Creating New Tongues: On Language as Adaptation and Resistance

Czesław Miłosz wrote, “Language is the only homeland.” I didn’t understand that sentence when I first read it. I was too busy trying to speak correctly—in English, in Croatian, in a blend that never quite landed on either shore.

The first time I tried to read Miłosz aloud, my tongue caught on the ł in his name. I was in class, new to the U.S., and eleven years old. My American teacher smiled, corrected me gently, but my cheeks burned hot. That same week I said “misery” instead of “mystery.” A few kids laughed. I didn’t. I stopped raising my hand for a month. I learned to taste every word before I let it out.

But I understand Miłosz now—not just intellectually, but bodily. Like tongue in English, the Croatian word jezik refers to both language and the tongue in our mouths—the spoken word, and the muscle that shapes it, or gets bitten when silence is safer. Or scorched, when a truth slips out too fast.

What he meant, I think, is that when borders collapse, when flags change, when your birthplace wakes up with a different name—sometimes six names—you realize your country hasn’t just split; your language has, too. Suddenly, one tongue wears four alphabets. Six new passports, three new anthems, and a dozen ways to say mine. What lingers is the echo of a phrase that only your people say. A joke that dies in translation. The lullaby your grandmother hummed while shelling white beans into her apron, her voice low enough not to wake the war. What stays is the syntax. The cadence. The words no one else knows how to carry.

The old state had collapsed. The new state was telling us how to speak. We used our tongues to carve out a space between what was imposed and what was ours.

In my grandmother’s kitchen, sentences simmered like soup. She never snapped. Even anger came out in full idioms: “Prije ispeci pa onda reci,” Bake it before you speak it, she’d say, tapping a wooden spoon against a pot for punctuation. Words were not thrown, they were tempered.

At first, I thought that saying was just village wisdom—a folksy version of Think before you speak. But under communism, it meant something else. A careless sentence, a joke dropped at the wrong table, could mark you. Or your father. Or the neighbor with too many books. Language wasn’t expression; it was a confession, or armor.

Even children knew this. On the walk to the village school, we knew we had to greet strangers—always. But before we spoke, we had to choose. Two greetings danced on our tongue: Good day or Blessed be Jesus and Mary. Both polite. One dangerous. We had no way of knowing which of these the stranger expected—only that one might keep you safe, and the other might mark you.

You chose. You spoke. You got it wrong.

The stranger pulled your ear until it burned raw. And the next day, the teacher called you to the front of the classroom: Didn’t we teach you how to speak properly? How to greet people? Then came the walk—the shuffle to the front of the classroom, the shame of standing there on display.

Speech was a test. A trap. You learned to scan a face, to read a posture, to hesitate. Because as they say, “Cim otvoriš usta, odmah znaju tko si.” The moment you speak, they know exactly who you are.

That’s how it worked—even the smallest words carried weight. Every sentence was a risk, every greeting a gamble. Meaning bent itself around silence. Opinion disguised itself as proverb. Grief folded tightly inside idiom, like a note slipped under a door.

I still carry that delay in my mouth. Even in English, I sometimes test a sentence before it leaves me—like checking the oven. The habit is not fear, exactly. It’s memory. It’s the politics of the tongue.

For decades, the tongue was policed. Jokes were told behind hands. Opinions were filtered through euphemism. Even laughter came out sideways. Then Yugoslavia unraveled and suddenly the gates burst open. We spoke until our jaws ached. After years of swallowing our words, we let them spill.

When a regime collapses, one of the first things to erupt is language. Suddenly, the unspoken can be spoken, but still in disguise. We didn’t say, The new president is absurd, but we made up a word like nabiguz (someone who stuffs their ass with greed) or samofukalo (self-fucker), and everyone understood. The absurdity was shared. Laughter was code.

After the war began, everyone wanted a piece of the tongue. It was as if each republic reached for a slice—Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Macedonia, Kosovo—each claiming theirs, correcting it, renaming it. The language was so savory, so full of bite and mischief, that no one wanted to admit we’d been sharing it all along. Everyone wanted their own version. Their own dictionary. Their own alphabet.

We speak now of the balkanization of nations, but what about the balkanization of the tongue? Suddenly, one language had to wear four new names. People who’d grown up understanding each other perfectly were told they no longer shared a vocabulary. New alphabets, new rules, new slogans. Yet beneath it all, the rhythm stayed the same. The vowels stretched in the same spots. The jokes still landed—if you knew how to hear them. What we witnessed wasn’t just linguistic divergence. It was a rupture we tried to bandage with phonetics.

Overnight, dictionaries announced new norms, as if speech could be disinfected. Words were “cleansed” of their Yugoslav residue, scrubbed down to fit a newly drawn border. In Croatian, this led to

brzoglas—fast voice—for telephone,
zrakomlat—air beater—for helicopter,
milokliz—sweet-slider—for penis,
and for condom? Udna tuljica. A limb sheath.

It would’ve been funny if it hadn’t been official—if it hadn’t come with flags and checkpoints and new textbooks for children. And the more official the rules became, the more an underground language—humorous, grotesque, barbed—rose up in protest.

We created entire anti-dictionaries, full of words not meant for permanence but for play. For a release.

A chair? Cetveronožni guzni podupirac—a four-legged ass prop.
A radio? Zvucni propovjedac—a sonic preacher.
Pants? Dvocjevni nabiguz—two-barreled ass stuffers.
A belt? Okolotrbušni hlacodržac—around-the-belly pants-holder.
A pencil sharpener? Zarezivac drvene misli—carver of wooden thoughts.

Absurd? Absolutely. But also brilliant. The old state had collapsed. The new state was telling us how to speak. We used our tongues to carve out a space between what was imposed and what was ours.

These neologisms weren’t just clever. Vulgar and vivid, they were the people’s unofficial dictionary. A resistance lexicon. They were a gesture—a sticking-out of the tongue to the regime that had tried to silence it for so long. In our culture, to bare your tongue—especially in crude or exaggerated ways—isn’t just playful. It’s profane. It means: Fuck you. It means: You don’t own my mouth anymore.

Today, if you search for neologizam in Croatian, you’ll mostly find imported marketing terms: anti-aging, afterwork, aquapark. Borrowed words for borrowed lives. The kind of language you pack in a dutyfree suitcase. There’s even an official Dictionary of Neologisms, compiled by the University of Zagreb’s Department of Linguistics. Flip through it and you’ll find global gloss: android, after party, all-inclusive. Language of the market, not the street. Branding, not survival. But the neologisms I remember weren’t about trends or tech. They were local and lowbrow and laughed in the face of collapse.

The tongue I remember did more than speak. It bit. It barked. It joked. Made mischief. Broke rules. Even when we borrowed, we bent the new words until they fit our crooked rhythm. Take guglati—a perfectly conjugated Croatian verb born from Google, now fully domesticated. We twisted it. Made it ours. Now it lives in sentences with samofukalo and nabiguz, cheek by jowl. Global brand, village filth, one syntax.

This, too, is tongue-work: the art of blending the absurd, the slick, and the subversively local until the whole hums with mischief.

In my case, it’s a tongue stitched from Dalmatian hinterland dialect, postwar Zagreb officialese, and Midwestern Montessori English. A patchwork—frayed in places, but alive.

Even now, my aunt in California says she’s “driving a car-u.” Half-English, half-Dalmatian, fully hers. The suffix roots a foreign word in local soil—makes it ours.

I’ve spent decades switching tongues. In Dalmatia, I learned to stretch vowels wide, to tuck meaning into idioms, to joke before I wept. In America, I learned to speak gently, cleanly—apologizing in every sentence. Croatian stalled for me around age eleven. English rushed in: fast, glossy, eager to please. One tongue paused, the other performed.

When I returned to Croatia during the war, I sounded strange in Zagreb. A shopkeeper stared when I said “šta” instead of “što.” She smiled—tight-lipped, like I’d walked in barefoot. My cousin whispered, They can tell you’re from the village.

Sometimes, in the pause before you speak—in the silence between layers—you taste the word. It stings. It startles. And it belongs.

I still mix those sounds. I still mistranslate myself. But that mix—awkward, stitched, imperfect—is what keeps the whole thing alive.

It was that roughness that carried humor, resistance, survival. In my village, jokes weren’t told so much as inhabited. We didn’t speak about trauma—we cooked with it, laughed around it. A cousin once said, “Ako žurimo živjeti, imat cemo vremena za sprovod.” If we rush to live, we’ll have plenty of time for the funeral. A proverb disguised as a punchline. That was our syntax.

But not all tongues were treated equally.

We were in a café in Zagreb, my coffee cooling untouched. Without thinking I said, “Bog.” My friend looked up and, in English, corrected me lightly: “It’s Bok here.” I felt something shift behind my ribs—like a word was being evicted. Bog means God. Bok, on the other hand, means nothing. A stylish secularism had replaced a word much older and deeper. Such changes were never about mere sound and grammar. They were about who gets to seem modern. Whose tongue remains relevant.

Now a new kind of voice has entered the room. Not urban or rural. Not Zagreb or Dalmatian. A voice with no accent, no idiom, no pause. It speaks smoothly, but it remembers nothing it says.

Machines are fluent. GPS voices give directions in accentless English. Chatbots complete our sentences. The radio spoke English before we did. But all of that fluency is hollow. It carries no hesitation, no inheritance, no risk.

A machine will never know what zrakoprc means—air-fucker, a word for someone who talks and talks but says nothing. It will never understand the weight behind “Bacila se u Crveno jezero”—She threw herself into Red Lake. Not just a sentence, but a wound. It won’t get the joke when someone says, “Bacila se u Hercegovacko jezero”—She threw herself into Herzegovinian Lake—a lake that doesn’t exist, in a country that barely holds. The satire only lands if you know the absence.

My cousin once joked, Kids chew rubber boots now too. Only theirs are screens. He was remembering the cow he once left to graze behind a bush while he played soccer. He kept glancing over in case she wandered off. But she stayed. After the game, he found her chewing an old rubber boot. She looked content. But she wasn’t fed.

That’s how this new fluency feels. The voice is smooth, but it tastes nothing. It remembers nothing. It speaks, but hasn’t lived.

The same cousin now beams about ChatGPT.

She knew everything about Imotski, he said. So polite. So clear.

A voice with no hunger. No grief. No gossip. A voice that’s never bitten itself trying not to speak. Real language stumbles. It hesitates. It remembers.

I think of Tin Ujevic, Croatia’s great poet, who once entered a tavern unshaven and was refused wine. He returned the next day in a suit. They served him. He poured the wine into his pocket. Feeding the coat, he said. You weren’t serving me.

That, too, is language. Who’s being fed? What’s being served?

So which tongue do I speak? The one with its idioms and bite? The one honed in books and softened with apology? I don’t know. I’m still patching it together. Still chewing on rubber boots and village jokes. Still testing the oven. Still translating—not just between Croatian and English, but between worlds. Because in the end, the tongue remembers what the dictionary forgets. Sometimes, in the pause before you speak—in the silence between layers—you taste the word. It stings. It startles. And it belongs.

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