Talk:Bosnian language/Archive 3

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Numbers

Total number of speakers of so called Bosnian... up to 5 000 000 ??? Hahahaha, wikipedia, get serious please, don't allow those stupidities :)))))))) Please. We'll die laughing. Oh Gosh!

That's just the higher estimate for those that declare it their spoken language; it's up to the individual what he calls his native tongue. There is a source on the section. Evlekis (Евлекис) 18:29, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

Grammar

As a source for my edit:

Bosnian grammar from 1890.

--WizardOfOz (talk) 14:49, 25 April 2010 (UTC)


I think that somebody skilful with Wikipedia and technically savy is on a mission to glaze over differences between the official languages of three distinct countries (Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia) by cramming their languages under one category: Serbo-Croatian. Although their factual differences are not large and although it would be more practical for these countries to have only one language, this is not the factual case at the moment. Serbo-Croatian is not taught in their schools (language that was used in time of Yugoslavia) and, as far as I know, no publications are currently written in it. So why is every English article about these languages pushing the idea that they are considered Serbo-Croatian? People who use these languages do not consider them Serbo-Croatian nor they ever use the category Serbo-Croatian in their schools. Differences, as minor as they are, should be respected and wikipedia ought to publish the most up-to-date info. I think that somebody skilful with Wikipedia and technically savy should seriously consider respecting these languages and stop promoting the false idea that the majority of people who use it consider it Serbo-Croatian. Despite the fact that the savy Serbo-Croat uses good references, most of them were written by foreign authors and he usually fails to mention that there are many others who challenge their views, i.e. they are not overwhelmingly considered accurate. Local linguists and theoreticians (who actually use the language) should occasionally be taken into consideration as well. Bizutage (talk) 08:43, 12 May 2011 (UTC)


[copied from user talk]

... There is noone talking about that those two grammars are not quite simmilar, but the article is about Bosnian (which have own grammar rules), and not about SC (which also have own rules but no more publications)! Following your opinion, we should delete all articles about south slavic languages, even SC, and just make a article about slavic-church language. This will also include deleting of Slavic and Czech. So please rollback your edit or give sources which can aprove your opinion. --WizardOfOz (talk) 16:39, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

The point of the merger is not to paper over any differences, but to consolidate the commonalities. Please see the talk page at Croatian, where nationalists are trying to impose a walled garden on this very idea, that there is anything common to the SC standards. I have deleted nothing supported by RS's. If you believe otherwise, please indicate specifically what I've done wrong. ... You also should know that that pathetic stub in the grammar section was not encyclopedic. Since all the info is in the main article, it should not be there: see WP:Fork. As I've said, if you want to write a summary of the main article at Bosnian language, as we have at Croatian and Serbian, by all means do so; if you wish to discuss the development of distinctive elements of Bosnian, even better. That would be encyclopedic and most welcome. (Though note there is already an article on the differences between the BCS standards.) kwami (talk) 16:51, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
I haven´t take a look at the other articles, mea culpa, but have saw those redicoulus entries in the summary on this one. About nationalistic POVs on the talk of Croatian language, I will never take a part in one of those discussions as I am blocked on hr.wiki by one nationalist [X]. But in otherway, even if I not agree with users like Roberta F. in other cases, in her post above she has right. Compilation of one language without publications since 1992 with three living languages (let us leave macrolanguages by side), is truly original research. Prefering of SC as "the only one", is also a political wiew. The proclamation in Vienna 1875 was just a only possible solution for accepting of an "unified" language in whole Yugoslavia on that time. The solution was maded as a political base to show the accepting of each other. The end result was the war in the 90´s :). As a solution for those discussions all across the wikies, I prefer a "stand alone" variant of each. In educational point of Wikipedia, such edits and marging just leave the reader in an labyrinth of uncertainty. It´s like (beside that most of USA readers don´t even know where Bosnia or other countries are) giving something to reader without conclusion and just saying: try to search elsewhere, we are writing, but we don´t know it. If we now take a look at this article, from a readers point, what will we conclude: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, are just a part of Serbo-Croatian. Ok. In which country is this language spoken? Is there any official publication on this language? Whatfore are the other languages which are official spoken in few countries if it is simmilar? What are the differences?, thats what i will ask myself as a reader. If we suspect, that some of readers have a middle degree of any education, they will search for solutions elsewhere. That is the point, where the scientific world is loughing about million of editors here: they are writing nonsense on Wikipedia. I know that there are enough rules on every single project, but the fact is that those rules just glorify some political decisions in the past. I will wait for some time and perhaps include the grammar part of SC article. But untill then, it will be nice to see an admin leading trough the discussion and leaving some room to move, and not reverting with such explanations. Hope for a good cooperation in future. Best regards --WizardOfOz (talk) 17:30, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
[X], really! He's one of the principal irritants on this project too. I sympathize with you: He appears to be completely irrational.
I see where our difference lies: The difference between the meaning of the word "Serbo-Croatian" in English, and of srpskohrvatski in BCSM. Here we are using SC simply as a cover term for the language standards based on Shtokavian. That's how English speakers understand the term: Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Montenegrins speak a mutually intelligible language, for which this is the label. For example, the US Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats and other officials, has a course in "Serbo-Croatian".[1] That's just how the word is used in English. (It may also be used for the old official standard of Yugoslavia, but that is clearly a secondary understanding in English; since that standard is now defunct, it is rarely used with this meaning anymore except in historical writing.) SC may leave something to be desired as a name, but it's better than any of the alternates (BCMS, Central West South Slavic) and is far more WP:Common. To the average English speaker, the fact that SC has four national standards (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin) is no more relevant than the fact that English has separate US, UK, Canadian, Australian, NZ etc. standards. If they want to call those separate languages, fine, but that's just terminology. Meanwhile, you wouldn't claim to be pentalingual because you understand English, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin! That would only count as bilingual. Since the grammar (incl. the phonology) is essentially identical, per WP:Fork it should be covered in one place. Since the WP:Common name in English is SC, it should be covered at SC. We do the same thing with Hindi-Urdu grammar, rather than duplicating that info at Hindi and Urdu. It's simply much easier to maintain the info when it's gathered together in one place.
This has nothing to do with any claim that there is an official SC standard, nor does it deny that there are separate BCMS standards. In fact, all articles go to pains to point out that out. In other words, use of the term "Serbo-Croatian" in English does not have the political connotations that it does in BCMS. While Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats may find it offensive, that is carry-over from their own culture and history, and is largely irrelevant to an English-speaking audience. Of course, we do try to address those sensitivities by taking care to address the issues of language standardization, but that cannot be allowed to dictate how everything else is presented.
BTW, if you can suggest an alternate name that would (1) be recognized by normal English speakers, and (2) not cause offense to nationalists, that would be fantastic, but so far we've not been able to come up with one. We could debate whether the article should be renamed Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, but I don't think that's likely to succeed. Anyway, the debate over what we call the article is largely irrelevant to the need to merge duplicated material. kwami (talk) 18:02, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
Didn´t know that you also have expirience with X, LOL, have just seen the discussion above and didn´t tought that there is deeper "contact".
About your link to the FSI, i know the problematic. One of my friends has been a assistant professor on the departement of speech on the Southern Illinois University, and she is a bosnian origin. I´ve heard about the tries to explain the different behind the most common name and the differents between those languages. She gived up and moved to NYC :). That is one of the problems of the en and de wiki; using common names no matter if they are right or wrong. As you say "better solution for article name than SC", we can´t call it others. It is a language and that is a fact, even if we dispute it. But also, the fact is that there are three other languages which have been the base for the creation of SC. We claim that SC is the one with the most common name, and it is for sure, but SC is just a result of approximation of the serbian and croatian. It has been unified 1875, long after other two had they own grammar and dictionaries. Now we are trying to move to the base, but we are just on the crosspoint. Serbian and Croatian have been unified to Serbo-Croatian and now are leaving this "federation" in two different ways. Just like the states do. The croatian is have token the german way and the most of the new solution are based on the german grammar. The Serbian is based (in his developement) on the Framkophonetical ground. Bosnian is trying to be a different and take the SC as a base, including some borrowed words form the Ottoman empire. But the fact is that SC is on his end, and the others on the start. As I sayed above, I will try to include some parts of SC article in to the bosnian, perhaps you can take a look at my english grammar then? --WizardOfOz (talk) 18:48, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
The different traditions of written grammar books is to be distinguished from the objective grammar of the language itself. (The English word "grammar" is polysemous that way.) So yes, the tradition of describing Bosnian as opposed to Croatian or Serbian grammar should be the subject of this article. But the actual grammar itself (inflections, syntax, etc.) should be consolidated in "SC grammar", since it's practically identical for the different standards. Also, dialectical variation within Bosnian may be of interest. Again, you're still thinking of SC as an official standard. On the ground, Shtokavian has always been a single dialect, regardless of what it was called, and that's what we cover in the SC grammar article, regardless of what that's called.
I'll be happy to review your English, though how long I take will depend on how prolific you are! kwami (talk) 19:04, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
But if you take a look at the article SC, the presentation shows it like a shtokavian holy mother. There is no presentation like it is a parallel of others (i know my english is horrible) or a result of the unification. That is what leads the nationalistic parts to such discussions. If someone shows up that it is one family but different children (even if one is a stepchild), it will be much easier for all :). And by the way, I will try not to keep my edit small for correction in the next days :) --WizardOfOz (talk) 19:40, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
If you have particular suggestions for how to improve it, that would be nice. I imagine that it was originally written for the Yugoslav official standard, and only later coopted as a cover term for modern BCMS. As with many articles, the editing probably wasn't very good when it was refocused. Also, SC in the general English sense isn't just Shtokavian, but all Serb and Croat dialects. We might even be able to split the article: "SC (spoken language)" vs "Standard Serbo-Croatian" or "SC (Yugoslav standard)" or some such. One could cover BCMS as a mutually-intelligible spoken language, and the other as the defunct official standard of Yugoslavia. I won't make such a decision myself, because I'm not familiar enough with the subject to anticipate the consequences, but it would be worth bringing up on the Talk page. kwami (talk) 19:48, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Genetic classification

The classification of Bosnian as deriving from Serbo-Croatian is factually incorrect and please do not reintroduce this back into content. Serbo-Croatian is a construct of the 19th century. Period. Mentions of Bosnian as a language, both by native speakers and foreigners, go back centuries before anyone even used the term Serbo-Croatian. The first known dictionary of Bosnian from 1631 is another work that references the language under that name and predates the existence of a unified Serbo-Croatian language. Furthermore, when the new Neo-Shtokavian East Herzegovinian based standard was introduced in schools and other institutions in Bosnia-Herzegovina under the Austro-Hungarian rule starting from 1878, the official name under which it was introduced was again Bosnian, it was changed to Serbo-Croatian in 1908. No argument regarding widespread use of the term "Serbo-Croatian" in the English speaking world can be a justification for historical revisionism. Bosnian deriving from Shtokavian is accurate, its relationship to the now defunct Serbo-Croatian language can be explained as a section in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.36.233.255 (talk) 00:17, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

You are quite wrong. Bosnian is derived from the Shtokavian dialect which is the basis for standard Croatian and standard Serbian as well. "Serbo-Croatian" is the term used in English to describe all the non-Slovenian Western South Slavic dialects--the three standard languages based on Shtokavian (Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian) as well as Kajkavian, Chakavian, and Torlakian. --Taivo (talk) 03:58, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

I am not 'quite' wrong. Modern Bosnian standard is derived from A Shtokavian dialect, not THE Shtokavian dialect, as there are several Shtokavian dialects. Older Bosnian texts are in dialects other than the one used for the current standard. You may want to revise what a language, standard language and dialect is. "Serbo-Croatian" as a cover all term is by no means universally accepted in English speaking world, especially regarding language history. "Serbo-Croatian" was a politically chosen name in the 19th century which was never fully accepted even in former Yugoslavia, and does not have any meaning outside that historical context, especially in regard to language history. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.36.233.255 (talk) 08:39, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Please don't edit war, or you'll be blocked. Bosnian is the East Hercegovinian dialect of Shtokavian, just like standard Serbian and Croatian. I would hope you know that. Serbo-Croatian is the common English term for this language. It doesn't matter what the politics are, but if you have a better suggestion for a name, please give it here.
Also, if you want to argue that Serbo-Croatian is a political fiction, then we should delete this article, as the Bosnian "language" is also a political fiction: taxonomically, the official language of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia is just Shtokavian. — kwami (talk) 09:04, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

I do not 'edit war', I corrected your dubious classification of Bosnian. If Wikipedia is not an open encyclopedia but a place where relevant edits are considered vandalism and users blocked, at least we have made progress in you publicly announcing that. As far as the name is oncerned, post-Yugoslav era institutions, books etc. in the English speaking world, when they want to treat the three standard languages as a group, often use the term BCS. Your edits are basically an attempt to push political viewpoints created and maintained during the times of Yugoslavia as the only valid, and do not reflect any kind of linguistic reality. "Serbo-Croatian" is not recognized as a language anywhere in the former Yugoslavia, it has no official status nor it is taught in any ex-Yu universities. The viewpoint you are trying to present basically ignores pre-19th century history, post 1990s developments and the volatile language situation in former Yugoslavia where this issue was by no means settled. I have provided my arguments regarding edits, you have not addressed any of them constructively. As for your private opinions on what fiction or non-fiction is, perhaps you could go to the German-Dutch border and convince them that the separation of those two is also linguistic fiction as both sides of the border can understand each other very well. Perhaps you should go to the Dutch language page and change it to Low Franconian?

Edit warring to correct an article is still edit warring. The problem here has been the unending complaints, principally at the Croatian article, but also here and at the Serbian article, by people who are better informed by Balkan political propaganda than by English usage. We have similar problems with Greece and Macedonia, Macedonia and Bulgaria, Serbia and Kosovo, etc. If you want to move Serbo-Croatian language to BCS, or any other name, then propose that at the SC talk page. If you have the sources to convince people that that term has replaced SC in general English usage, we will likely move that article and update the articles of the various standards to match. See WP:RS. But if you're only seen to be yet another biased editor trying to deny some unpleasant truth, you're not likely to get anywhere. — kwami (talk) 12:38, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Let us be clear - is this an article about the Bosnian language written in the English language, or is it an article about what some English speakers understand as Bosnian and/or Serbo-Croatian? If it is the latter your suggestion to start digging up ONLY English language literature would be relevant. If it is the former however, then the primary source of information are the relevant scientific publications done by native speakers. I have read many of those, and nowhere have I read that Bosnian is considered by Bosnian linguists to be a dialect of some imaginary language called "Serbo-Croatian". It is similar with Croatian sources, and, yes, with many English language sources. The same way I would not presume to tell the Dutch and Germans what is Dutch and what is German on their mutual border, I do not see how any non-native source can be more relevant than native linguistic viewpoints as well as the official status of Bosnian in various constitutions where it is named as one of official languages (Bosnian, Montenegrin, Kosovan etc.) Now, if you had problems with some of those sources you could have made a section in the article itself explaining your view with appropriate sources, but instead you choose to vandalize and censor other SOURCED views. You have demonstrated in this discussion the lack of basic understanding of what a dialect, language and standard language is - just look at your offer to "rename" Bosnian into Shtokavian. You have also not addressed any of concerns raised in my posts, instead you chose to simply disregard them as "nationalist propaganda". Now, why would I want to go to some other page to have a committee decide for me what Bosnian language is or is not? I have Bosnian linguists to help me with that. I did not come visiting "Serbo-Croatian" language page, nor am I interested in that dead language apart from where it concerns my own Bosnian, i.e. historical perspective and consequences of the now aborted linguistic unification. My time will be better spent writing an article about Bosnian and publishing it somewhere where this kind of censorship is not applied, because, quite frankly, the state of this article is disastrous - it is pure rubbish. The only practical result of this censorship of yours will be to in the end misinform the general public, who will in practice, if they visit parts where Bosnian is spoken or deal with works in Bosnian get views radically different to what you here are presenting as the objective truth. My concerns however, about your actions here, have been and will be transmitted to other interested parties. Unless you have anything else relevant to add, I propose we end this discussion.

You are of course correct in saying Bosnian is not a dialect of SC. The dialect is Eastern Herzegovinian; Bosnian is a standardized form of that dialect, just as Serbian and Croatian are. However, you are not correct in saying that Bosnian is a dead language. Serbo-Croatian is spoken by 16 million people, and all of its standards, including Bosnian, are doing quite well.
We don't normally require sources to be in English. However, the Balkans is a special case, due to the extreme amount of distortion published in the languages of the region, and the difficulty arbitrators of the multitudinous disputes have in evaluating their reliability. For example, we don't rely on Greek or Macedonian sources on whether the name of the FYROM is "Macedonia", nor on Serbian or Kosovar sources on whether Kosovo is a separate country.
As for the idea that SC is an artificial construct, that is of course to some extent true. The Western South Slavic isoglosses separate several divergent varieties subsumed under Slovenian, some with Kajkavian, and Chakavian + Shtokavian. So, if you wish to distinguish languages based on isoglosses, then Bosnian is a form of a Shtokavian, or more likely "Chaka-Shtokavian", language. However, we do not determine WP:Truth on Wikipedia, but report on what is said in the relevant literature. "Shtokavian language" is simply not a phrase that is often found. According to most of the literature, Western South Slavic is bifurcated into Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian; SC is then trifurcated into Kaj, Cha, and Shto (ignoring transitional Torlak); Shto comprises various dialects, including Eastern Herzegovinian; and E. Herz. has four officially standardized forms, including Bosnian. The Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian dialects have also converged to some extent due to efforts at standardization. That, therefore, is what we report. If you wish the article to say something else, it is up to you to provide WP:Reliable sources for your view. And I concur: until and unless you have encyclopedic support for your claims, there is not much point in continuing the discussion. — kwami (talk) 16:54, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Languages are not distinguished by isoglosses. Dialects and dialect groups are. Language by itself is partly a historical and political construct which cannot be judged solely on the basis of some 'objective' linguistic factors. But never mind that, I am not here to teach you. Now, if we want to be entirely precise, Eastern Herzegovinian has no officially standardized forms, let alone four. It was used as the basis for the standard languages, but all three standards (Montenegrin is still in the standardization phase) differ from it in some respects, where certain features of it were not accepted into the standards or rather 'rolled back' to conform to some imagined prestigious form of the language. Someone speaking East Herzegovinian dialect would generally be instantly identifiable as not speaking standard language. Furthermore, whether ekavian Serbian, which is the much more widely used variant of Serbian, is really based on East Herzegovinian, and not Šumadija-Vojvodina dialect, is something that can be and is disputed. As for books, I have read so many, by reputable authors, both in English and one of BCMS languages which say no such things as you are claiming. As for truth, it is of course clear to me you are not interested in the truth, but just for the record of future readers of this discussion, every claim made here by me can be readily sourced. As for your value-judgment on Balkans' scientific credibility, it is just that - a value-judgment unwelcome in any truly scientific discourse. Finally, to quote Marc L. Greenberg's (Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, University of Kansas) view on the use of "Proto-Serbo-Croatian" in scientific papers, as a response to your attempt at historical&comparative linguistics and language classification: "For one thing, we cannot be very sure about the features, sociolinguistic situations, and alleged past boundaries of these proto-dialects, especially of such dubious constructs as "Proto-Serbocroatian," a notion that has more to do with the 19-20lh centuries than it does with the 9-10th.". I couldn't agree more. :) I agree with your last sentence. Ćao. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.36.233.255 (talk) 17:26, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

When languages are dialects in a continuum, as is the case with Slavic, then isoglosses do play a role. You see the same thing in Romance, Germanic, and Indic. As for SC being more a product of the 19th century than the 9th, I agree as well--but as you said, languages are also the product of politics and history, so the 19th century also counts. Regardless of all that, though, English speakers call the system of mutually intelligible registers and dialects spoken by Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (as well as the non-mutually intelligible lects Croats consider to be part of the same language) "Serbo-Croatian", and that's therefore the terminology we use. — kwami (talk) 20:29, 15 December 2010 (UTC)

Oh my God, here we go on and on and on again and again. This is what you get when you have nations forming in the age of the Internet. The fable "West" has sorted these things out 150 years ago, but right here in the Balkans we're only starting to deal with all these identities, nationalisms and all other tedious Bronze age stuff. And Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and now recently Montenegrins are boring the world to death (but apparently not each others) with their constant bickering about language, wars, fascists, communists and anything else you could imagine. Let's get things straight now, shall we? First of all, a nation is a political construct. More importantly, a nation is an abstract entity. There are no nations in nature, only in human minds. Nations in the modern (European) sense were mostly formed during the industrial revolution, when, as someone put it, Europeans decided to switch from religion to another common identifier, so they made up culture, and started collecting fairy tales and epic poems about medieval kings. Besides, check the wikipedia article on nation if you don't believe me. And if you don't (you, the unsigned one) then you probably believe in said fairy tales. So, nations have not existed since the dawn of time, and so haven't the languages. It is of course true that Serbo-Croatian was created in the 19th century based on the east Herzegovinian štokavian dialect, and South Slavic idioms were much more differentiated before that. But, you see, this last fact is irrelevant. It is irrelevant because we Serbo-Croatian speakers do not speak in pre-19th century idioms. We speak that same language that was created by Vuk, Gaj and others in an attempt to create a South Slavic nation. In this last bit they of course failed miserably, but their language (again a political and ideological construct) succeeded in becoming the literary language. And we've been over this a zillion times. It is not a matter if anyone likes it or not, it is not a good thing and it is not a bad thing, but simply: Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrin speak the same language. This is a simple linguistic fact and it is the opinion of pretty much every non-native linguist specialized in the matter, and for the sake of terminological uniformity it is called Serbo-Croatian in English, plain and simple. Now, stop boring people from civilized countries with Balkan nationalist mythology, they are simply not interested. And no one is trying to force your very special language (whichever it maybe, I really don't care), spoken since the stone age and so very different from that neighbouring one into anything. Call it as you like, speak it as you like, but that will not change the fact that it is indeed the same as that neighbouring language. Jasno?Zhelja (talk) 02:29, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian? Smells like a lower-end political agenda

Dear Taivo,

like you I am also an academic, in the natural sciences, and I hate to see Wikipedia abused as a vent for skewed nationalist politics. It is no surprise either that certain Serbs and some Croat currents oppose the separate identity and language of the Bosnian/Bosniak people; beliefs which inter alia culminated in the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia 17 years ago. Regarding the issue of language, it is important to underline that Serbo-Croatian was constructed as a political umbrella term within former Yugoslavia strongly favoring Serb and Croat interests while leaving out the Bosniaks politically discriminated, also withdrawing their choice for "Bosnians/Bosniaks" in population censuses while instead introducing "Muslims by nationality". The bottom line is, historically, Serbo-Croatian is not a proper language or even a valid term any longer, however further (incorrect) use is fiercely pushed by Serb and Croat individuals as to undermine the actual validity of the Bosnian language, which is officially recognized as its own language and not as part of another. It is therefore highly incorrect and erroneous to maintain that "Bosnian is a form of Serbo-Croatian" as currently attempted by a number of editors. It may however be acceptable to write that Bosnian language is sometimes still refereed to as Serbo-Croatian, but only if stressing that this is unofficial, defunct and incorrect. I appreciate and hope for your help. Thank you. MarcRey (talk) 18:43, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Interestingly I just discovered that you are one of the individuals promoting the misleading mentioning of Serbo-Croatian in the Bosnian language article. This leaves me very disappointed given your supposed academic background. You are fundamentally mistaken that Serbo-Croatian is used in the English language as a name given to B/S/C. Nowhere is this considered accurate any longer (for which I can provide you with a heap of sources). Obviously the factual description of a language in a Wikipedia article should reflect the official conditions as opposed to unofficial contextual use. I also urge you to not underestimate my editorial capacity on Wikipedia, despite my lack of user account I have a previous editing history on Wikipedia stretching 7 years. And this battle should not be too difficult considering you are contesting what is pretty much an axiom by now. MarcRey (talk) 18:43, 12 January 2012 (UTC) 22:53, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian is a term given to a language previously and not a language itself. A crucial difference which is trying to be omitted currently. The POV-tag is of necessity. MarcRey (talk) 18:43, 12 January 2012 (UTC) 23:12, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

I just recently noticed by the courtesy of another user that I had been using an incorrect POV-tag for the dispute at hand. Interestingly, no other user in the discussion felt obliged to underline that the faulty POV-tag was criticizing the article's title. MarcRey (talk) 11:58, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
I love the source some of you have given for the Serbo-Croatian classification of Bosnian. Basically, school work. I am appalled by the ignorance and regressiveness you have chosen to impose on the language standards in former Yugoslavia, all that on the cost of Wikipedia's good name. I do hope you have some reason in you but I better prepare myself for a prolonged process. Obviously, a fraction of Serb (possibly Croat) editors have had the comfort of editing undisturbed for a long while. MarcRey (talk) 18:43, 12 January 2012 (UTC) 23:49, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
We've been over this before at the Serbian and Croatian pages. It's really simply repetitive nationalistic propaganda that somehow Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian are not mutually intelligible. Indeed, all three standard "languages" are not only completely mutually intelligible varieties of a single language, but they're even based on the same dialect of the one language. It's just religio-nationalistic political propaganda to say they are somehow different "languages". We label them three "languages" because the nationalists insist upon it for political reasons, but linguistic science only stretches so far and will not admit any attempt to claim that these are not mutually intelligible varieties of the single non-Slovenian West South Slavic language that is most commonly called "Serbo-Croatian" in the linguistic literature. Grow up and get over it. You are acting like a bunch of little children trying to insist that "My language is better than your language." It's even worse than that--you're a set of triplets trying to claim that your other siblings are adopted or that you have different fathers or that you were born at different times. Your "languages" aren't separate languages at all, but varieties of a single language and you can all very easily understand one another. If we put you in a room and turned off the lights you couldn't tell who was Croatian and who was Serbian and who was Bosnian. Those are just the linguistic facts. --Taivo (talk) 04:29, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
Once more, I am not under any circumstances contesting the mutual intelligibility of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian; in fact three varieties of the same basic language. Hence, I would appreciate if you could pay greater attention to the proceeding discussion or stay out of it. Absurdly enough, you are constantly referring to one phenomenon we all despise (religious nationalistic propaganda) but at the same time strongly adhere and insist on the invalid usage of a linguistic umbrella term sprung out of religious nationalistic propaganda intended to position, in first-hand, Serbs, and secondly Croats, as the dominant class in undemocratic communist Yugoslavia, in turn undermining the national and human rights of Bosniaks/Bosnians, a medieval European nation. According to some of the responses I've received during the course of this discussion, these are supposedly my own "personal opinions" of none concern to anyone else. Then I choose to ask you these three simple questions: 1) Was Yugoslavia a democratic state catering the opinions of all peoples? 2) Ethnicity by religion as established by Serb and Croat leaders to replace the Bosniak/Bosnian ethnicity appears to be highly inflamed by political bias and denial of national rights, don't you think? 3) If such a nation, as Yugoslavia was, selects to introduce a language called Serbo-Croatian in order to "coincidentally" cater the interests of the two dominant groups (Serbs and Croats), while excluding the Bosnian/Bosniak nation from any consideration, and in addition with the latter being massacred and raped a few decades later under the banners of "Death to the Turks!" and "Return to your ancestor Serbs and Croats", do you not evidently recognize a certain nasty religious nationalistic propaganda of which "Serbo-Croatian" was a child? The solution is No, Yes, and Yes. Importantly, none of these are to be considered opinions but rather established facts, among other recognized by a west-sanctioned agreement signed by Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, Serb president Slobodan Milosevic, and Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic. Thus the renouncement of Serbo-Croatian as a proposed umbrella term for three varieties of one and the same language was not imposed because of politics, but rather introduced by politics in the first place, and one of the reasons war broke loose. To summarize, it would be insane to claim that B/S/C is not the same language in origin, people understand each other perfectly well, but the classification of these varieties as Serbo-Croatian is anything but sound today. Neither are your constant claims of Serbo-Croatian "as the only suitable term" and "as the most frequently used term" accurate. In reality, Serbo-Croatian is never used in official context without strongly underlining its defunct status and continued use as a "pseudo-language", and also colloquially you shall see that Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are separately used on a vastly more frequent level than Serbo-Croatian, however often underlining that they are mutually intelligible and previously classified as Serbo-Croatian. Even a simple search on Goggle yields more hits on Serbian language, Croatian language, Bosnian language, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language than what it does on "Serbo-Croatian language": Serbian language, Croatian language, Bosnian language, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language,Serbo-Croat language
1. Serbian language: 301 000 000 hits
2. Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language: 136 000 000 hits
3. Bosnian language: 75 400 000 hits
4. Croatian language: 34 700 000 hits
5. Serbo-Croatian language: 28 900 000 hits
Now I would please like you to provide us with actual sources on the common usage of Serbo-Croatian instead of the milk-additive language described below. And to finally wrap up things, excuse me for saying that I somehow fail to see you as an expert on Biological anthropology Taivo, with regard to your last lines. Personally, I can spot and differentiate between Bosniaks, and Croats and Serbs, with extreme accuracy as there are indeed physical characteristics unique to each. This has also been shown recently by haplotype analysis, albeit preliminary, but further studies are sure to shed more light on this matter. Until objective wide-scale studies have been undertaken, neither you or I can comment on the supposed kinship between Bosniaks, and Croats and Serbs. A new POV-tag has been inserted. MarcRey (talk) 13:11, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
Yes, I like the story of the Serbian linguist talking with a visiting scholar for two hours before realizing he was Croatian. And there really is no substitute for "Serbo-Croat(ian)" in English. People simply don't go around saying "Oh, I have a friend who knows BSC!". Others would think it's a milk additive or something. — kwami (talk) 07:06, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
MarcRey, you clearly failed in Understanding Context 101. My last line had nothing whatsoever to do with biology and I never made any such claim. I was talking about the mutual intelligibility of the languages and turning off the lights simply removed all visual (biology, costume, hair style, etc.) input and focused entirely on auditory input. Simple Google searches are completely substandard in Wikipedia usage--there are too many uncontrolled variables. And the issue isn't the existence of Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian (and now apparently Montenegrin) as labels for national varieties of Serbo-Croatian. Even you admit these aren't languages but mutually intelligible varieties of a single language. The question is what to call that single language that they are all varieties of. The most common label in English is Serbo-Croatian and your characterization of respected linguistic sources that use that label as "school work" is simply childish itself. There is a single language that comprises all the non-Slovenian speech forms of West South Slavic. I looked at your Google search and you are wrong in your number about "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian". If you actually look at the results, you will see that virtually none of them have the literal phrase "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian" with slashes. They most commonly have a list of varieties of Serbo-Croatian: "Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian". Google simply interpreted the "/" marks as commas. So your argument is false to begin with. Indeed, if you look at the third result, the first one that isn't Wikipedia, it has "the splintering of Serbo-Croatian", referring to the common language name for all three of the named nationalist varieties. The third source that you use to show "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian" not only fails to show that form, but shows that the common name is, indeed, "Serbo-Croatian". Your argument, therefore is false and you have no evidence. --Taivo (talk) 17:02, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
Other Google results on your results list that are actually counterarguments to your assertation that they show "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian":
So, you see, the first page of your Google Search showed ten results, but only one or two of them actually have "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian" with slashes and not commas and several of them still point to "Serbo-Croatian" as being the most common name. Indeed, two of the results were Wikipedia and you can't use Wikipedia as evidence for Wikipedia. You simply have no firm evidence for "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian" and no solid argument that "Serbo-Croatian" is not the most commonly used term. --Taivo (talk) 17:16, 15 January 2012 (UTC)
Taivo, after reading your response which frankly made me sick to my stomach I find myself convinced that no solution to this exists but turning to the higher office of wikipedia. Your so-called analysis of the Goggle results is so exposing of your distorted state of mind which bestows you with the ability to turn around everything to your benefit and excuse, but simultaneously one can sense your desperate attempts at saving the situation. But I will be sure to re-take class 101, you respected mighty Wikipedia intellectual. At times like these editing on Wikipedia is really pinpointed by the phrase "Arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded". But here I go again dissecting your absurd response.
1. Your respected source (Benjamin V. Fortson, the others are not specified) is apparently taken out of context. I'll give you that the author in question uses a clumsy formulation by writing "one language called Serbo-Croatian" as this suitably leaves room for you to deliberately misinterpret it as "the language Serbo-Croatian". In reality, the sentence by Fortson only consolidates the highly volatile use of the term Serbo-Croatian and its non-existing status as a proper language. Not having read the book, I suspect the author clarifies this in the very same paragraph. But do not despair I am underway of collecting a heap of accredited books with formulations not vulnerable to abuse by you. I did not intend to use the Goggle search as any sort of source, although it being of higher standard than your interpretation and use of aforementioned sources, but as a manifestation of your preposterous ambitions. In addition the Goggle search gave us all the opportunity to witness your analytic chauvinism.
2. I am completely aware of the issue at hand being how to classify Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, but perhaps you have been victorious so many times at the Special Olympics that you ceased to comprehend the posts of other users? Please do not insult my intelligence, or your own rather.
3. Your solution proposed to the problem above is Serbo-Croatian; a "solution" which actually causes more problems than offers relief. What is more, trying to revive Serbo-Croatian on Wikipedia in the year of 2012, 20 years after disqualification, is original research and plain aggressive.
4. The pathetic whitewash imposed on the Goggle search by attributing any sort of relevance to whether commas or slashes are used is below all community standards. Irregardless of comma or slash these hits clearly display the fact that instead of writing "Serbo-Croatian" the formulation "Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian", which technically denotes the same as B/S/C, is overwhelmingly more frequent. If "Serbo-Croatian" had enjoyed the wide-spread usage you dream for and claim, at least every second or third of these hits would read "Serbo-Croatian" instead of "Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian". Why would anyone write "Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian" as opposed to "Serbo-Croatian" had the latter been so common. Serbo-Croatian is not common at all, and extremely less common than B/S/C (B,S,C)(wise-guy). The third source or hit you refer to once again reveals your highly distorted interpretation. The book in question discusses, in part, Serbo-Croatian from its historical point of view, in fact the only view it may be addressed from, 2012. And to satisfy your wise-guy attitude here's a quote from that very book, however without your beloved slashes: "New approaches to accent and clitic ordering, two of the most difficult points in BCS grammar". And this is not to mention your self-destructive and desperate choice to mention this single hit on three separate occasions in your post. So let me see if I get you straight, my "argument, therefore is false and I have no evidence". Oh boy if they only wrote slashes, mommy! The fifth hit is one of the few, if not the only as far as I can tell, choosing to use a formulation similar to the one you are pushing, in addition it is a non-accredited personal web page by individual Simon Ager. Comfortably hand-picked I'd say, Taivo. You are burning your chances to be taken seriously. But still the most gut-wrenching part of your reply must be the last hit you refer to, where on earth do you find any support to your conclusions on Serbo-Croat being a functional and existing classification on B/S/C? I am slowly begging to feel ashamed over the violation of axioms in this discussion. A quote from the same page: "Before the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990's into the different republics, linguists and Yugoslavians referred to the "Serbo-Croatian" language which had regional differences. After the breakup, it was decided by the that these regional varieties would be termed "Serbian", "Croatian", "Bosnian" and "Montenegrin." A mentally healthy conclusion inferred from this is that B/S/C cannot be classified as Serbo-Croatian any longer. Taivo, seriously, will any further discussion with you do any good, or shall I just collect sources on my own and approach the administrators right ahead one I'm done? MarcRey (talk) 20:54, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Your comments, MarcRey are 99% whining. The 1% that isn't is simply misinterpretation of your alleged sources. Your Google search plainly and simply didn't prove what you wanted it to prove. You wanted to prove that the non-Slovenian West South Slavic dialects are collectively called "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian" and it proved no such thing. It proved that the only single name for that language is still "Serbo-Croatian". The only other alternative that the links showed is simply not calling it anything but "the language that includes Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian (and Montenegrin)." Your POV is so blinding to you, that you seem to be incapable of honestly evaluating sources and will throw anything out there at all. And Fortson is not the only source that shows "Serbo-Croatian". Since you think that's the only linguistic source, you clearly don't do your own research and are completely ignorant of linguistic bibliography. Your idea of "research" is doing an ill-formed Google query and then insulting the other editors who actually know what they're talking about. Unless you have actual linguistic sources to show, then we can pretty much ignore your rants. --Taivo (talk) 21:21, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes you are correct, I do not possess the same profound knowledge on the pesky issue of commas and slashes. Personal discussion with Taivo discontinued. MarcRey (talk) 21:35, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

I award Tiavo this star for his incessant attempts to reintroduce a defunct linguistic classification the whole world renounced 20 years ago just "beacsue there is no better", for his attempts to smear other users, and lastly but not least for his attempts to dodge all input to the discussion. From hereon the matter shall be adressed through WP:DR, at least for my part, where I will paste relevant portions of the various discussions we've had as well as citing actual literrary work. MarcRey (talk) 22:03, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Since I am nowhere near as patient or nice as Taivo or Kwami, I deleted your 'star' - don't abuse the Talk Pages this way again. HammerFilmFan (talk) 11:03, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
Whatever. Since you're a new guy, you probably don't realize that dispute resolution involves interacting with the same interested editors you find here--in other words, you'll see me and Kwami there, too. The first question the admin looking at your request there will ask you is, "Have you notified all the other involved editors?" It's not a way for you to bulldoze your personal opinion of what Wikipedia should and should not do. It will involve the same reliance on Wikipedia policy and practice, including the use of reliable sources rather than government dictates, that has frustrated you here. See you there :) --Taivo (talk) 00:36, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
Let me just say that he did notify me but I didn't have anything to say here. I am currently unable to understand what is actually wanted. I must admit that I was tempted to stop by and ask for a star for myself but maybe that would had put him over the edge. I am glad that Taivo was here before me. Regards, --biblbroks (talk) 07:25, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Number of Speakers

Number of speaker figures are slippery because just asking someone what language they speak often returns the wrong answer in an actual linguistic sense. That's why we don't use sources that are not specifically reliable linguistic sources. Ethnologue is the typical source of record, but if other language surveys have been conducted, they can be considered. Why do people give surveys the wrong answer about what language they speak? The reasons are many--political (I will tell them X so my ethnic group gets more money), social (I will tell them X so my family isn't discriminated against), historical (we've always called our language X). If you ask any speaker of Timbisha what language they speak, they will always respond with "Shoshoni", although they don't speak Shoshoni. A new language was recently discovered in India because the linguists involved recognized that the X language in a particular village wasn't like the X language anywhere else in the area and wasn't even related. Speakers simply don't reliably know what language they speak in many cases. "I live in Bosnia, so I must speak Bosnian." "I'm a Muslim in Serbia, so I must speak Bosnian." That's why we must rely on only reliable LINGUISTIC sources and not on the general numbers found on a BBC website, which probably simply took the population number for Bosnia and assumed that all Bosnians speak Bosnian. --Taivo (talk) 13:52, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Which probably simply took the population number for Bosnia and assumed that all Bosnians speak Bosnian is not true in that case. The problem in this special case is, that me nor anyone else can provide the real number. Even Ethnologue is one day talking about 4M and the next day about 2M. I understand that calling the language who someone speak Bosnian doesn´t already count him as a speaker. But which sources are used by Ethnologue that we can´t assume that others are using better? I can´t imagine that some institution like BBC with that kind of reputation will provide statistics without a hard cover. My problem is that I can provide enough bosnian sources, but those doesn´t even count for me, not to talk about others. And as this is more than unclear how many that realy speak it, I think that both possibilities should be named and listed. To say it straight: 2-4 millions, nobody knows. And if we go to the rules, the user who has insert the number for the first time was right, but he removed the sourced 2M and that was wrong. I can´t see any rule or anything which is against such additions if they are informative and a improvement for the article. What I missed, is a bit of willingness to compromise by Kwami. I already had a discussion with him on commons, and even if it sounds silly (his words) he is a POV pusher. I have no problem about discussing it, but not with people who don´t even accept others meaning. --WizardOfOz (talk) 14:10, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
But in that case if a random "linguistically reliable" news agency mentioned an estimate on this number, then we should use that data in the article as well? --biblbroks (talk) 20:06, 4 February 2012 (UTC)
The 15th ed. of Ethnologue (2004) gave 4M as of 2004 (just for Bosnia, but that was the only figure they provided). In the 16th ed (2009), they changed that to 2M, still from 2004. I don't know what happened: typo? misread the source?, but presumably they had a reason. Now, the BBC source Oz quotes is the same 4M, and from 2003. Since Ethn. decided between 2004 and 2009 to halve their estimate, the BBC figure is out of date—besides not being a RS. Similarly, Wolfram|Alpha (with the same 4M figure) is not a RS, and in this case isn't even dated. Ethn. is not the best source, but at least it's a linguistic one, and is more recent than the others. If Oz can find a better linguistic source, by all means let's have it. Since he's an admin on Bosnian WP, you'd think he'd have the figures available if anyone does. — kwami (talk) 01:46, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
48% of our pop. of Bosnia, plus 1.8% of Serbia, gives us 2M as well, going just on ethnicity, but it's not at all clear that all speak "Bosnian". There's large pops in the EU and US (400 & 350k), but again, that's ethnicity, not language. The Ethnologue figure would not seem to be far off. — kwami (talk) 13:01, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
PS. In researching this, I came across the 1993 language law, which states that the official language of Bosnia is the "Ijekavian literary standard", which will be called by the ethnic names as appropriate. Our Bosnia article had said that B, C, and S were all three official languages, but one link was dead, while the other (CIA) said only B and C were official, which can't be correct. If anyone knows if the situation has changed as has a verifiable ref to support, please correct. — kwami (talk) 13:06, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
Constitution of the federation and the Constitution of Republika Srpska in both of them stands that those three languages are official. Still looking for sources about the number of speaker which are not bosnian, serbian or croatian sources... --WizardOfOz (talk) 15:27, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. That's helpful, and I'll add those to the article, but they don't tell us what the language situation is at the federal level. I wouldn't be surprised if the law has changed since 1993, though.
BTW, Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian sources aren't necessarily bad (we do use them in our articles), but given all the heated politics, we've learned to be wary. — kwami (talk) 16:13, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
There is not a word about languages in the Constitution of Bosnia and Hercegovina. It was published by the parliement, but the link seems to be dead. --WizardOfOz (talk) 16:39, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
(responding to something further up in the discussion) Sources like the BBC and even the CIA are notorious for looking like reliable sources for linguistic information. After all, they're the BB-f..in'-C !!! But, upon closer examination, very, very few large organizations like that actually hire real linguists to gather or report such language figures. They tend to be very sloppy in the sources they use--sometimes even using Wikipedia. The fact is that most non-linguists don't really understand what linguistics is or how language really operates, too often confusing ethnicity with language. The CIA Handbooks, for example, are incredibly sloppy about it. While the BBC is a very well-respected news organization, it's simply not a reliable linguistic source (nor is the other source cited above). --Taivo (talk) 16:10, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
I have enough of austrian university publications that I found today, but all in german, and the last time I´ve got it on the head kind: we need en sources and not others because of common name and so on. Therefore I don´t even think of using bosnian or other sources. --WizardOfOz (talk) 16:37, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
Just because a source is in German doesn't make it unreliable. Wikipedia doesn't require English language sources, just reliable sources. If you use a foreign language source, you simply need to supply a translation. And in this case, I don't think that "common name" issues are problematic since there isn't a confusion among competing German terms. If a source is unreliable, it is unreliable for other than source language reasons. --Taivo (talk) 19:32, 5 February 2012 (UTC)


I had some time and looked a bit into the documents to which links have been provided here. And here is what I found in the document "4_8_2009_48_ustav_srpski.pdf" (here referred to as "Constitution of Republika Srpska"):

Maybe I made a typo or two since I typed it in and not copied it... sorry for that.

Anyway, I wanted to mention that I am not certain that this quote states that official languages of Republika Srpska are Serbian, Bosnian/Bosniac or Croatian.


In the other document, "constitution_fbih.pdf" (here referred to as "Constitution of the federation"), I found this quote:

and further down on the same page of this document, in what I believe is a footnote, I found this:


This time I copied the text so the possibility of an error should be smaller.

If I were to reflect on this quote I could say that a rather sloppy work has been done in translating this in English - if this was translated from some language and not written in English originally. While if it was written in English originally, than this might be even worse. Why, because in English these languages are called Serbian and Croatian... not Serb and Croat. At least, as far as I know. Maybe those aren't the same languages that the document talks about: "Serb language" and "Serbian language", as well as "Croat language" and "Croatian language"? Also a mention of diverging from the original term ("Bosniac language") to a new one ("Bosnian language") is at least peculiar I think. I mean in the terms of sloppiness of the work done. Finally, this is the primary i.e. the fundamental, law, or should I say, principle, of one state/republic/entity. Isn't it? Or is this mention of diverging from terms another situation of different languages: that is that "Bosniac language" doesn't equal "Bosnian language"? And by that, that "Serb language" doesn't equal "Serbian language", and/or that "Croat language" doesn't equal "Croatian language"? This could be rather confusing... I mean if we are to be so meticulous to go into such details as we are when discussing constitutions. At least in my opinion. --biblbroks (talk) 00:33, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't seriously think any reasonably intelligent reader is going to think that "Serb language" and "Serbian language" are different. That's just normal variation in English. The bigger problem is that the text apparently says the official languages are Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, but the footnote says they're just Bosnian and Croatian. In other words, the constitution of Bosnia is not reliable when it comes to what the official languages are. --Taivo (talk) 01:28, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
Isn't the footnote stating a change due to an amendment, that is, that Serbian was added as an official lang?
I expect the variation is probly just inconsistent translation. — kwami (talk) 01:55, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
The footnote would be removing Serbian. But the inconsistency is a problem. --Taivo (talk) 05:18, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

The footnote is pointing out what it originally was, which is that only Bosnian and Croatian were official in the start of the Federation. (No surprise there) biblbroks' translation above is faulty, more precisely it is "The official languages of the Republika Srpska are: the language of the Serb people, the language of the Bosniak people and the language of the Croat people. The official scripts are Cyrillic and Latin." [2][3] which was done since the Serbs had to officially recognize it, but still avoid recognition of its name (Greenberg p. 156). -- ◅PRODUCER (TALK) 11:33, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand: where did biblbroks translate anything (at least in the first document) so as to speak of biblbroks' translation? And what surprise was there... or wasn't there? Also, why must we agree to an opinion that Serbs had to officially do anything lest recognize it: that is recognize one language? Is this to say that they had to officially recognize that there is only one language after all? Or is it another inconsistency in the documents called Constitution? And yes, I was pointing out to the inconsistencies - but we can't be sure of the inconsistencies' causes. Maybe, while writing the document, the typist's/writer's hands were shaking because of bad conscience. :-) Not to mention other options of creating the document (if it wasn't done with hands) o_O --biblbroks (talk) 13:41, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

There are no "inconsistencies" as these are two separate constitutions for two entities. The constitution in RS' case is purposely ambiguous and backed by (Greenberg p. 156):

[...] in 2002, when international intermediaries and the Office of the High Representative under the leadership of Wolfgang Petrich sought to guarantee equality of the three nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina in both its entities. These efforts were supported by a decision of Bosnia's Constitutional Court in January 2000. The language issue proved to be particularly contentious, as nationalist politicians in Republika Srpska and the Federation opposed the equality of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in their respective entities. Furthermore, the Bosnian Serbs refused to make references to the "Bosnian language" in their Constitution, since they never had recognized this designation for the language. The High Representative to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Wolfgang Petrich, intervened in Republika Srpska on 19 April 2002, by imposing the constitutional amendments. The amendment on language avoided the use of the disputed "ethnic" terms for the languages, stating: "The official languages of the Republika Srpska are: the language of the Serb people, the language of the Bosniak people and the language of the Croat people. The official scripts are Cyrillic and Latin." This provision replaced paragraph i of Article 7 of the Republika Srpska Constitution, which had declared Serbian to be the official language of the entity.

In FBiH's case Bosnian and Croatian were "originally" the only official languages (where in RS it was only Serbian) and Serbian was later added. To my knowledge the constitution of BiH, on a national level that is, says nothing of official languages.-- ◅PRODUCER (TALK) 14:14, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification, Producer. --Taivo (talk) 14:51, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
The only question I have is whether the 1993 language law has been amended or superseded, or if the federal language is still officially SC (what it calls Ijekavian). — kwami (talk) 15:21, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
Taivo, how is official in constituents the same as official at the fed level? If English were the official language of all 50 US states, that wouldn't make it the official lang of the US. — kwami (talk) 18:29, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
Yes, Kwami, it would if DC followed suit. But if there were regions of the US that were not subject to the official English law, then you would be correct. In Bosnia, however, unless there is a region not subject to one of the two constituents of the country, then 1+1 does, indeed, = 2. The point of Wikipedia isn't to confuse the reader, but to make information as readily accessible as possible. If you can find a place in Bosnia where Serbian is NOT one of the official languages, then constituency might be relevant, otherwise it isn't. --Taivo (talk) 20:55, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
No, it would not, not even with DC. There are laws at both the state and federal level, and universal application at the state level is not the same as application at the federal level. For instance, it might be illegal to print state ballots in anything but English (or other official state languages), but legal to print federal ballots in any language. — kwami (talk) 21:10, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
Your analogy, of course, has some problems since you're comparing the declaration of a majority language as official to the declaration of a minority language as official. My question stands, "Are there any regions of Bosnia where Serbian is not an official language?" If the answer is "yes", then the constituencies should be listed separately. But if the answer is "no" (which I suspect it is), then it's pointless (and potentially confusing to readers) to list them separately. The federal government in Bosnia is very limited in scope and authority, so if both constituents have declared Serbian as an official language, then that is de facto the declaration for the nation as a whole. --Taivo (talk) 22:00, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
How am I talking about a "minority language as official"? AFAIK, the official language of BiH is SC, not Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian. — kwami (talk) 22:06, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

On a federal level in 1993? It's hard to speak of a federal level when the war was still on going. Also note that "in September 1993 the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, imposed the ekavian dialect as the official pronunciation in Serb-held territories of Bosnia-Herzegovina." (Greenberg, p. 76)

As it stands now, all three "languages" are official in both FBiH and RS albeit in different wording. As Taivo said, it's rather pointless to list the entities instead of the state when both carry the same statuses. -- ◅PRODUCER (TALK) 22:44, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

And Kwami, you know that I share your views on the status of Bosnian, etc. as "languages", so my comment could be reworded "dialects" or "subdialects" or "religio-ethnic lects" and still be valid. --Taivo (talk) 23:07, 6 February 2012 (UTC)
So... I wrote to the sil.org and I´ve got the answer today. Following the answer of Charles Fennig, managing editor of Ethnologue, the first link with 4M from Kwami on my talk was a estimation of the Bosniaks in the World. The second with 2M is based on the population in Bosnia (48% of 4,6M). Those speakers in Serbia, Croatia and MN are not counted, but listed in the publication. He will try to find out what has went wrong and will answer me in next days, as all other estimations are worldwide. I hope that this will help to clear the number. And as Producer wrote above, the Constitution of BH has nothing about the languages. Those are only listed in the constitutions of the entities. The footnote in the constitution of FBiH is because of adding Serbian which was not in the first variant. --WizardOfOz (talk) 16:57, 8 February 2012 (UTC)
The E15 figures are odd regardless. Take a look here.[4] The number for Bosnian matches the population of Bosnia. (Coincidence?) Also, the population of Serbian and Croatian speakers in Bosnia is on par with the number of Romani: all three at 10%. It is odd.
As for the number of Bosnian speakers outside Bosnia, E16 has 204k. The figure they give is the "Population total all countries". The problem is that while the 204,000 outside Bosnia are to the nearest thousand, the 2M within Bosnia are only to the nearest million, and 2M + 204k = 2M, not 2,204,000. For instance, if the calculation really is 48% of the population of 3.915M (in E16), as you say, then the population in Bosnia would be more precisely 1,880,000, and the addition of Serbia etc. would raise it to 2,080,000, which is still approx 2M. Unjustified precision in numbers is a problem throughout Ethnologue. They seem to have no concept of how to add. — kwami (talk) 02:52, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
The lack of precision in numbers in Ethnologue is related to their overall original (and continuing) mission--to get a general idea of how feasible or necessary a Bible translation is. The whole idea is to get a general idea and not to accurate enumerate every speech community. Unfortunately, their publications are about the only place where there is at least an attempt at a number for the speakers of every speech community. In Linguasphere, there is only an order of magnitude for each lect--the numbers, 0-9, actually correspond to the number of zeros, with 0 meaning extinct and 1 meaning 1-99. So we should be thankful for the rough level of Ethnologue, otherwise we'd have nothing for most languages. --Taivo (talk) 05:17, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Agreed. We just need to be careful when copying Ethnologue figures. I was hoping to get around to getting a project started on verifying the population figures on all languages where we currently rely on Ethn. One of the instructions would be, when the language is listed as spoken by 200 people in country A in 2004, and 10,000 people in country B in 1976, and Ethn. says it's therefore spoken by 10,200 people, we can't actually use the latter figure. — kwami (talk) 11:39, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Intentional ambiguity and its further implications

Actually if the wording in the constitution of RS was purposely ambiguous and therefore ambiguous in toto, we cannot ascribe which language is the term "језик бошњачког народа" referring to. Nor to which language(s) are the terms "језик српског народа" and "језик хрватског народа" referring to. To say it in other words: it is possible that they are all referring to different lects of one and the same language. Isn't that the price of being ambiguous in politics - it has its consequences in linguistics as well. And to reiterate: I think that there certainly are some inconsistencies (plural), since there is one inconsistency (Croat language cf. Croatian language) and there is another (Bosnian language cf Bosniac language). Although not in the same document but nevertheless in a constitution of one and the same entity. --biblbroks (talk) 19:44, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't think језик бошњачког народа can mean anything in English other than Bosnian, unless you want to argue that the official language of RS is Serbo-Croatian. — kwami (talk) 11:20, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Yes, it might be. --biblbroks (talk) 11:28, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
That would agree with the 1993 language law. Do we have anything less ambiguous to go on? Should we word it "FBiH and possibly RS"? We'd need to make the same change for Serbian and Croatian. — kwami (talk) 11:35, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
(edit conflict) I thought of exactly this when considering how to exclude its officiallity in RS, but it appeared somewhat cumbersome and even subject OR. Though, I won't object to wording such as that. Also to comment on s in languages: we cannot be sure if it doesn't mean dialects rather than languages. At least IMO. --biblbroks (talk) 11:48, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
"We cannot be sure if it doesn't mean dialects rather than languages" lol what? The constitution explicitly uses the term "languages". Also, I have no idea where you got this impression that Serbo-Croatian is the official language of RS. Again, RS began with "Serbian" as the sole official language then the OHR sought "to guarantee equality of the three nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina in both its entities" and made these changes. I think you need more context on the matter above. They disputed using "Bosnian" but not "Bosniak" which the Bosniaks did not agree on so now you have this "compromise" you see before you. -- ◅PRODUCER (TALK) 11:56, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Now isn't this a blast. First you called my translation faulty, whereas I haven't translated anything in the text mentioned, now you put compromise under quotation marks in two posts more than ten minutes apart. I might be wondering why you have expressed your astonishment with where can an idea such as that emerge. But, hey, I won't do it. I will instead ponder how come you forgot that it's a fertile ground that machine of the humans called mind. Why would I, or anyone for that matter, care what some constitution explicitly states or not when it is obvious, and moreover, explicitly stated that the wording is ambiguous. And this ambiguousness even supported by refs. The history of this ambiguation is even more irrelevant in such a case. google:Šta+je+pisac+hteo+da+kaže had 545.000 results when I checked it last time. If something is a compromise, then it must have its side effects. --biblbroks (talk) 12:56, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Again the constitution says (I've provided the English version above): "The official languages of the Republika Srpska are: the language of the Serb people, the language of the Bosniak people and the language of the Croat people. The official scripts are Cyrillic and Latin." The edit by biblbroks is pure nonsense. -- ◅PRODUCER (TALK) 11:44, 9 February 2012 (UTC)

Bosnian is a form of Serbo-Croatian

This has been discussed many times and the first sentence is written exactly in the manner supported by reliable linguistic sources and parallels the articles on Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin. Leave the first sentence alone. --Taivo (talk) 13:29, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

dead link, and no cites, for two years - removed to here per Wikipedia rules

A number of Croatian linguists, specifically Radoslav Katičić[citation needed], Dalibor Brozović[citation needed], and Tomislav Ladan[citation needed], consider the appropriate name to be "Bosniak" rather than "Bosnian" whilst some other Croatian linguists (Zvonko Kovač[citation needed], Ivo Pranjković[citation needed]) recognize it as Bosnian. In the opinion of the former, the appellation "Bosnian" refers to the whole country, therefore implying that "Bosnian" is the national standard language of all Bosnians, not only Bosniaks. According to Croatian participant Radoslav Dodig, the renaming of "Bosniak" into "Bosnian" was not a process, but a semi-hidden maneuver.[1][dead link][2]

I left the tags in above to show the problems with these statements. Stuff like this DEMANDS it be cited. If Reliable Sources can be referenced put it back in, but not until then. More than enough time was allowed for the citation notices to be acted upon. HammerFilmFan (talk) 10:56, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

Bosnian language Intro

Hi K, I do not understand the reason for your revert. My modifications did not state anything factually different from what the introduction previously did, but rather had it re-phrased to more elegantly present the complex relationship. There is no consensus as far as I can tell between the "five" as you describe them, each article seems to have a slightly different introduction. Unless you have a better suggestion on how to put an end to incessant IP edits to the article (which quite frankly occur because of the blunt opening of the intro) do not revert the edits the first thing you do. I think we should give the re-phrasing a chance, and of course if you feel we should discuss any matter I am always at your disposal. Best, Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 06:01, 26 October 2012 (UTC).

Actually, I suspect it will increase the IP problem, because now people at the other articles will complain about this one. But if you're going to edit war, I won't exacerbate it. — kwami (talk) 06:11, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
Actually, IP edits to the articles in question had decreased quite a bit over the last year and these intros have been fairly stable. --Taivo (talk) 06:16, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
Actually the intro to the Croatian language article differs a lot, and even goes as far as stating that Croatian is the Serbo-Croatian language, rather than a standardized register. Obviously there is no consensus that would make my edits incendiary. However, it does write the following about Serbo-Croatian: "Serbo-Croatian" in English, though this term is controversial for native speakers[7] and paraphrases such as "Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian" are therefore sometimes used instead, especially in diplomatic circles. I fail to see the inconsistency in my re-phrasing or why it should be suboptimal, on the contrary I believe it will have us avoid a lot of infuriated IP editing. It was never my intention to edit war with you K, I am sorry if I came across as such. Take care. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 06:18, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
It says essentially the same thing, but is perhaps a little easier to twist into saying what the nationalists want. As for hr, it is different: while bs is only an incipient standard, AFAICT (there are claims of ancient roots, but I haven't seen a RS to back that up), hr consists of a number of dialects whose only commonality is that they're spoken by Croats. — kwami (talk) 06:26, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
Do apologize if I fail to comprehend your point, but are you claiming that Croatian somehow would be more of a "real" language than Bosnian simply because it is less homogeneous? Source? Please elaborate. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 06:38, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
Never mind K, I believe Taivo's post managed to explain it to me. Cheers. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 07:10, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Taivo, if you insist on reverting the really insignificant edits I made please motivate it here, and why you think they're detrimental to the article. Obviously this is a touchy subject for you, more so on the Bosnian than Croatian article it appears. My take is that the intro is currently too blunt and needs to be clarified. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 06:23, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Those edits weren't "insignificant" since they don't really reflect the linguistic reality and are misleading. There is one non-Slovenian West South Slavic language that is most commonly called "Serbo-Croatian" in English. It has three major dialects--Chakavian, Kajkavian, and Shtokavian. Standard Croatian, Standard Serbian, Standard Bosnian, and Standard Montenegrin are all registers of the Shtokavian dialect. Since Chakavian and Kajkavian are both spoken only in Croatia, they are usually subsumed under "Croatian" along with Standard Croatian. Thus, the intro to Croatian language differs somewhat from the others because that label subsumes both Chakavian and Kajkavian in addition to Standard Croatian. It is a complex issue, but the overarching label for all this complexity is "Serbo-Croatian". And, Praxis, since it is you who want to change what is fairly stable text and is based on a consensus, it is you who must motivate your changes and build a WP:CONSENSUS for them. A stable status quo always takes precedence until a new consensus is built. --Taivo (talk) 06:44, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
Alright Taivo, thanks for explaining, it is certainly a mess. I do understand now that there is a standardized Croatian language (based on one of the dialects) and another non-standardized Croatian which is based on the other dialect. So all Croatian dialects cannot be considered standardized registers of Serbo-Croatian. However, shouldn't the standardized dialect take precedence over the non-standardized one in an encyclopedic description? I mean, the other dialect (or the "other" Croatian language if you like) can be approached at a later stage in the article without messing up the intro with an issue frankly beyond graspable for outsiders. I will try to formulate an intro covering the complexity of the matter while additionally taking into account the, shall I say, further complexity of Croatian. Your help is much appreciated Taivo. Take care. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 07:07, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
Nationalists want to push "X is a South Slavic language", as if they had no more in common than they do with Bulgarian. The language is Serbo-Croatian. Imagine if we started the General American article with "American is a Germanic language. The language is mutually intelligible with English." — kwami (talk) 08:17, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
To me it sound like you're over-thinking it and reading between the lines for no perfect reason. Let's make it perfectly clear, Serbo-Croatian as such is not a language, but rather a term applied to a language. To know the "true" name of this language we would need to know its exact ethnic roots which we don't (apart from that its Slavic), since languages arise from ethnicity (I presume). So yes, the Serbo-Croatian language is a language, but Serbo-Croatian is not (since we're being subtle anyhow). It would be nice to be shown some compromise, totalitarian viewpoints will lead nowhere, as , possibly, calling other editors nationalist (don't know what to think). Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 08:36, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
I'll come up with something that'll suit your aesthetic needs better soon. Sit tight. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 08:45, 26 October 2012 (UTC)
Praxis, it's not about "suiting our asthetic needs". It's about linguistic accuracy and using the most common name of this language in English. We don't invent some name based on "exact ethnic roots". That common name in English is "Serbo-Croatian". The reason I talked about Croatian is that the term can't be equated to Bosnian. However, Serbian and Montenegrin are exactly equivalent to Bosnian in Serbo-Croatian terms, so the intro to all three of those registers is virtually identical. --Taivo (talk) 11:21, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

A consensus?

For what? Reliable sources and accurate statements which aim to increase the objectivity and informational value of the article? I can't see your point, first you claim to want to achieve consensus of the opening paragraph describing Bosnian as part of Serbo-Croatian (fair enough). I back off and refrain from editing that sentence whatsoever, preserving the consensus, still I manage to somehow offend you with my other, unrelated, edits based on sources and statements found in the Serbocroatian and Croatian articles. Are you really going out of your way to limit Bosnian as merely an "incipient standard"? That is wrong and POV. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 13:13, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Bosnian article: The common base (vocabulary, grammar and syntax) of what are today officially four national standards is sometimes subsumed under the term "Serbo-Croatian" in English; dating from the 19th century, this term was modeled on both Croatian and Serbian nationalists of the time and is today controversial for native speakers[7]
Tag on the discussion page of Bosnian language: Use of that term in English, which dates back at least to 1864 and was modeled on both Croatian and Serbian nationalists of the time, is not a political endorsement of Yugoslavia, but is simply a label.
Croatian article: These four dialects, and the four national standards, are sometimes subsumed under the term "Serbo-Croatian" in English, though this term is controversial for native speakers[7] and paraphrases such as "Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian" are therefore sometimes used instead, especially in diplomatic circles.
Bosnian article: As result, paraphrases such as "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS)" are instead used increasingly, especially in official context.
Serbo-Croatian article : Prior to the 19th century, they were called "Illyric", "Slavic", "Slavonian", "Bosnian", "Dalmatian", "Serbian" or "Croatian"[34]
Bosnian article: Prior to the 19th century, the various contemporary standards were called "Illyric", "Slavic", "Slavonian", "Bosnian", "Dalmatian", "Serbian" or "Croatian"[8]
I rest my case, and in case you really want to push this I truly hope you have a good explanation other than that it "sounds a bit strange". Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 13:25, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
Or could the issue rather be with the subject headers (and gallery) introduced by me? So what, did Bosnian magically descend on the Bosnian soil in the 90s without being a successor to the early linguistic corpus of Bosnia (not least through arebica)?. I am just trying to precede you in this form of (absurd) discussion which I hope we won't be having. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 13:38, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
If there was ever a consensus, no matter its nature, it should subordinate itself to Wikipedia:Ignore all rules; especially, where the edits are clearly improving the article's content. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 14:04, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
Praxis, I advise you to consider both WP:AGF and WP:CIVIL. This article is very sensitive as you should know. With extensive rewrites such as you have proposed, it is prudent to judge what other interested editors have to say. It may very well be that your edits are productive, but with that much text added/changed/revised, it is simply good common sense on articles such as this one to test the waters and make sure that that we've not created a worse problem than we've solved. Back off on your heated allegations both here and at my Talk Page. I said nothing more than let's judge consensus on this. You may have good edits, but you aren't the only interested party here. --Taivo (talk) 14:22, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
Taivo, I apologize if I came off as crossed. But I can't help feeling rather indignant by you reverts at what are substantiated edits and almost near axioms. If we need to have a discussion, then let's have it. I have already presented my contributions, what's next? Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 14:45, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
There are a couple of things about what you wrote that felt like they were overstated having to do with the impression you gave of a sudden switch from "Serbo-Croatian" to "B/C/S". That's simply not the case. There are still plenty of linguistic sources that readers will encounter that use "Serbo-Croatian" and not any of the subordinate terms or any such Franksteinian construction as "B/C/S". Indeed, the only derivational difference between "Serbo-Croatian" and "Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian" is that "Bosnian" was added. I don't think that your assertions of a complete shift are valid. --Taivo (talk) 14:49, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
Second, the truth is that these three forms were treated as a unitary common language up until the dissolution of Yugoslavia. There is no justification for removing that statement from the text because it is the historical reality. --Taivo (talk) 14:52, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
Third, this is not the appropriate article for a discussion on what to call the non-Slovenian West South Slavic language. That discussion and description is more appropriate at Serbo-Croatian language, where the details of the naming controversy can be explicated one and for all rather than dribbling it out through the course of four or five articles. Since Wikipedia uses "Serbo-Croatian" as a label for that language, it's use here is appropriate without any lengthy discussion, but with a clear link to the more appropriately placed discussion at the Serbo-Croatian language article. --Taivo (talk) 15:05, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
Alright, I do get your point, the formulation used by me might have undermined the previous and continued relevance of Serbo-Croatian. Hence, I propose to modify my edit from the previous: — Preceding unsigned comment added by Praxis Icosahedron (talk • contribs) 15:39, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
The same subdialect of Shtokavian is also the basis of standard Croatian and Serbian, as well as Montenegrin, so all are mutually intelligible. The common base (vocabulary, grammar and syntax) of what are today officially four national standards is sometimes subsumed under the term "Serbo-Croatian" in English; dating from the 19th century, this term was modeled on both Croatian and Serbian nationalists of the time and is today controversial for native speakers[7]. As result, paraphrases such as "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS)" are instead used increasingly, especially in official context[8]. Prior to the 19th century, the various contemporary standards were called "Illyric", "Slavic", "Slavonian", "Bosnian", "Dalmatian", "Serbian" or "Croatian"[9]
to:
In the former SFR Yugoslavia, they were treated as a unitary Serbo-Croatian language, and that term is still used in English to subsume the common base (vocabulary, grammar and syntax) of what are today officially four national standards. Dating from the 19th century, however, this term was modeled on both Croatian and Serbian nationalists of the time and is today controversial for native speakers[7]. As result, paraphrases such as "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS)" are increasingly used, especially in official context[8]". Prior to the 19th century, the various contemporary standards were called "Illyric", "Slavic", "Slavonian", "Bosnian", "Dalmatian", "Serbian" or "Croatian"[9]
Whereas you might feel that I am undermining the "Serbo-Croatian" period I do believe that you are over-emphasizing it, and I hope this will be a balance. Note for example that the Croatian article intro does not mention anything on the status of Serbo-Croatian during Yugoslavia, and that Serbo-Croatian was the official language only during SFR Yugoslavia, and not the previous Kingdom of Yugoslavia. We are thus looking at a mere ~43 years. There is no dribbling discussion here on the term Serbo-Croatian, but a mere two sentences in the intro. I do not agree with your attempts to disqualify any objective description of "Serbo-Croatian" whatsoever. In effect, you show no willingness to compromise whatsoever, and still you expect us to have a discussion? I have offered you a compromise and if you insist on making complete blocks I believe some form of arbitration might be in place. Because I won't sit here and combo different phrases only to have you predetermined to never allow anything not to your liking. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 15:37, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
Any reader who visits this article in educational purpose does not necessarily read through the Serbo-Croatian article also, and as controversial of a subject as it is, we cannot afford to neglect underscoring the tensions regarding Serbo-Croatian where it is due. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 15:54, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
I might however agree on removing "Prior to the 19th century, the various contemporary standards were called "Illyric", "Slavic", "Slavonian", "Bosnian", "Dalmatian", "Serbian" or "Croatian"[9]" as this might be slightly too abundant for an introduction. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 16:02, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

The final suggestion is thus a very neutral and minimal:

The same subdialect of Shtokavian is also the basis of standard Croatian and Serbian, as well as Montenegrin, so all are mutually intelligible. In the former SFR Yugoslavia, they were treated as a unitary Serbo-Croatian language, and that term is still used in English to subsume the common base (vocabulary, grammar and syntax) of what are today officially four national standards. Dating from the 19th century, however, this term was modeled on both Croatian and Serbian nationalists of the time and is today controversial for native speakers[7]. As result, paraphrases such as "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS)" are instead increasingly used , especially in official context[8].. Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 16:06, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

The final form you edited into the article was generally better except for the excursus on the history of the history of the term "Serbo-Croatian". That really isn't relevant here and more properly belongs at Serbo-Croatian language. The simpler the better so I edited your phrase a little more to get rid of the historical info. Readers at this article aren't interested in the details of "Serbo-Croatian", they are interested in Bosnian and the less verbiage they have to wade through about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of labeling the "non-Slovenian West South Slavic" language, the better. --Taivo (talk) 21:41, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
I will not be making any further edits until we've had a thorough discussion of the following points:
  • You seem to be fine with the Croatian article underlining the controversial nature of the term as well as that other names are being used (i.e BCS)? If you find this redundant for the Bosnian article should you not try omitting such 'excursions' from the Croatian article also, especially since you wish to achieve a certain coherence? In reality, it is quite obvious that there isn't any 'massive editorship' that might have interest in petite edits of the articles in question, so far it has been only you and I, and the issue shouldn't be blown up to more than what it actually is.
  • Regarding my edit to the Serbo-Croatian article: How is it that you perceive it as "accusatory language"? If anything the statement constitutes a fact which has been included into the "consensus tag" on the Bosnian talk page, perhaps even by you? For the benefit of a sound discussion I believe we should not conceal our [obvious] stances as proponent respectively opponent of the term Serbo-Croatian. In this regard, you insist that discussion of "Serbo-Croatian" belongs in the Serbo-Croatian article, but if such a discussion serves to "expose" and underline the nationalist attributes of 19th century Serbo-Croatian (SC) you object (i.e. "accusatory language").
  • I am also rather uncomfortable with the formulation "until the dissolution of SFR Yugoslavia", as this potentially implies that SC has served as language throughout history, when it is in fact a reasonably recent construction. I find it necessary to somehow emphasize its 19th century roots.
  • Moreover, not least for the SC article, 'Serbo-Croatian' was not an official language in the kingdom of Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croato-Slovenian and Yugoslav was. I saw director excusing this by saying "it was basically just a name change", however by that logic one could just as easily today claim that SC is the official language of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, and while it is true in one sense (it is one and the same language) it is 'officially' wrong. Hence, one cannot state that Serbo-Croatian (as a term) was official in the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Appropriate revision is necessary.
As for now I am quite content with the introduction here as it makes clear that the term is denounced by native speakers.Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 07:29, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
Any edits or improvements to the Croatian language article need to be discussed there. And since the term "Serbo-Croatian" predates the formation of Tito's state, then the statement "during the SFR Yugoslavia" is obviously wrong. Again, this article isn't about Serbo-Croatian and should not have a long excursus on the history of the term Serbo-Croatian. People reading this article aren't coming here for a history of Serbo-Croatian, but for Bosnian. And we're not talking about "official language" status, but about usage of that term in English. But that discussion is again not relevant for this article, but for the Serbo-Croatian language article. We don't want to be arguing this issue in five different articles, so that discussion has always been more relevant to the Serbo-Croatian language page. What do I think is appropriate here at Bosnian? 1) Many English sources refer to the single non-Slovenian West South Slavic language as "Serbo-Croatian". 2) That term is controversial among native speakers. Those are the two things that are important for this article on Bosnian. Any further enlightenment which the reader wishes they can get at the Serbo-Croatian language article. There is no commonly used replacement term in English for that language despite your attempts to portray some amalgam such as B/C/S(/M) as having gained some degree of acceptance. It is used by an author here and there, but it is by no means widely accepted as a replacement for Serbo-Croatian. --Taivo (talk) 11:50, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
OK Taivo, I shall confine any future edits to the two points outlined by you. We have an agreement.Praxis Icosahedron (talk) 19:14, 14 November 2012 (UTC)
  1. ^ Sanoptikum
  2. ^ [5]
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