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The solution

Well, as I see it, this situation with Croatian language page is not tenable. There is no way Croats will accept "Serbo-Croatian" as the umbrella term for their language. I could add more & more arguments (for instance, about problematic reliability or status of textbooks on Croatian available in English; or, on the name of the language dominating the language learning courses after 1991.,..), but I think it's unnecessary.

So, I propose:

a) to get rid of any umbrella term except Western South Slavic

b) or, when Croatian language is concerned, to put as umbrella term either Central South Slavic Diasystem (more or less covered by wiki article on "Serbo-Croatian", with a few corrections), or the triple reference Čakavian- Kajkavian-Štokavian (all these terms are wiki-described). As for Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin, their umbrella term could be either Štokavian (as is in the Serbian-language wiki article on the Serbian language), or- less precisely- CSSD. Mir Harven (talk) 17:58, 30 April 2010 (UTC)c

At the risk of sounding insensitive, it's irrelevant whether Croats will accept it or not. This is English WP, not Croatian, and therefore we follow English conventions, not Croatian. I'm sure that at WP-hr, editors are not willing to accept Serbian ultimatums. There is a cover term in English, and that is SC, used for example in the language depts at universities and by the US govt. "BCMS" is diplomat-speak, and CSS is a fudge that has never caught on. It would be different if we were discussing a commonly accepted factual error, but as we aren't, we follow the same path as other controversial wording, including nearby ones such as Macedonian. That is, WP:English and WP:Common name. — kwami (talk) 18:17, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

"Serbo-Croatian" is a conceptual relic from the 19th century. Also, it is self-contradictory & dated; this term is used- to, as yet, not reliable extent - by English-language institutions since: a) courses offered by these institutions and language classification from 1990s on give-as far as Croatian is concerned- lessons on Croatian, not "Serbo-Croatian". In case when "Serbo-Croatian" is still mentioned, it would be interesting to see which is the language content of these lectures ? b) bureaucratic inertia is not something any reliable encyclopaedia should be dependent on. This inertia has been broken, re. Croatian and Serbian, http://www.nsk.hr/DigitalLibEN.aspx?id=960 . So, there is a situation: no "Serbo-Croatian" standard language, as far as ISO classification goes; still some "Serbo-Croatian" hangover existent in various US or UK govt fields, contradicting other language classification decisions. c) language description in English-language courses on Croatian is, at best, dated (not to say something worse): it ignores the major part of Croatian language description from 1970s on. Then what else to expect from an essentially neo-grammarian approach (1890s-1920s) that had "established" the "SC" term ? And, at the end: this is not "science"-or even a rational approach, but superciliousness that eventually ends in grudging defeat: who can, with sane mind, stand behind a description of a language that has been rejected both by the native speakers & scholars of the referred language ? So, someone who has- at best- learned a foreign language to some degree, insists that descriptive categories which pre-eminent scholars of this same language- and virtually all the native speakers, find to be offensive & simply untrue - be held sacrosanct (sanctified, it seems, by bureaucratic inertia and political agenda of the ideology of serbocroatism (depicted, among others, here: http://openlibrary.org/b/OL3615122M/kroatische_Sprache_und_der_Serbokroatismus ). IMO, the insistence on "Serbo-Croatian" term & ideology is clearly a political issue, and not an impartial encyclopaedic entry. There is no evidence that "Serbo-Croatian" is a linguistic term in use as suggested in the article: a sort of language that is the umbrella-language for Croatian and other languages mentioned. Politics, not linguistics is what has invented "SC" term; also, this is what keeps it- for dubious purposes- alive. I'll put the three dialects as the cover term for Croatian, just to avoid edit wars. Mir Harven (talk) 19:15, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

This is a political, not a linguistic, issue. Here we're concerned about the language, although of course language politics should be covered. Cladistically, BCMS forms a unit, and the common name in 21st-certury English for that clade is SC. QED. Of course, Croatian and Serbian (as opposed to their standard registers) cover some different dialects, and that should also be discussed, but SC covers them all as well, so it is a valid term regardless. — kwami (talk) 20:17, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Prove it. Prove that BCMS form a unit, either typologically or standardologically. Your writing has so far relied almost exclusively on imagined US & UK classification standards (very low, indeed). And "macrolangue of Serbia" for ISO 639-3 was just another straw (not the last, but most hilarious). Therefore, you need to prove your contentions:

a) that lumping together BCMS languages is a linguistic, not a political move

b) that there is a standard language named "Serbo-Croatian" (no ISO inventions, please). What are the grammars, dictionaries, orthographies, functional stylistics books and terminological dictionaries of this "language" in past 20 years ?

c) which is the content of this "SC" books re mentioned fields & number of learning textbooks when compared with true languages as Croatian, Serbian, .. ?

d) does this macrolangue exist anywhere apart from ISO classification, the Hague tribunal and a part of US institutions. How do these institutions classify Croatian and Serbian, which is their credibility and which is their status, so to speak. Concisely: there is no umbrella term for BCSM either on the typological or the standardological level. And your arguments are of the type "everyone knows". I don't . I don't believe that UK and US institutions and language courses favor,predominantly, the "SC" term. Prove your statements. Mir Harven (talk) 09:25, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

The only one of those points that is relevant is (a), and other editors have already presented refs for it. The rest are straw men. — kwami (talk) 09:33, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

"Straw man" is just a cop-out when a participant in discussion runs out of arguments. So, from a) on- prove it & stop selling ISO politics as linguistics. Mir Harven (talk) 18:37, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

No, I'm saying that if (a) is true, the point is proven, and the rest irrelevant. Many languages have no standard; that doesn't mean they aren't languages. Etc.

As for (a), it's easy enough to demonstrate. Since I suspect that no evidence I bring will be considered sufficient, no matter how compelling, I'll be brief. Even a cursory look finds things like the 1993 language law of B&H: "In the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Ijekavian standard literary language of the three constitutive nations is officially used, designated by one of the three terms: Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian. Both alphabets, Latin and Cyrillic, are equal."

Even though that's more politics than linguistics, it admits that there's one language, which goes by three names. What of linguistic sources? Well, here's the Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world, chapter "Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian Linguistic Complex" (2006). It's organized into sections covering Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, each covering history and language politics. These are followed by a section carrying the title of the chapter, "Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian Linguistic Complex", which covers the linguistic description of all three as a single entity, and illustrates their distinctiveness from other SS languages as a single entity. This exactly parallels the situation we're proposing for WP, with separate articles on BCMS, but a consolidated article for their common grammar.

From the Croatian section: "it was understandable that nationalist politics should place particular emphasis on separating the Croatian element of the Serbo-Croatian language as far as possible from its Serbian counterpart."

From the grammatical section: "The language formerly known as Serbo-Croat belongs, with Bulgarian, Slovene, and Macedonian, to the South Slav branch of the Slavonic language family. [...] The dia-system linguistic complex is the most heterogeneous Slavonic dia-system, with an exceptionally large variety of dialects [... though] these dialects have a striking degree of connectedness [...] which distinguish the complex from all other Slavonic languages."

And later, "The language spoken in these countries is now officially known as Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, respectively." — kwami (talk) 20:00, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

What you've quoted are examples of language classification policy, not a linguistic "evaluation" (though, it's dubious that such an endeavor is possible at all). I'll stick to the point a) & contend that these citations you presented are just a former language classification blunders & nothing more. It all boils down to this: you cite sources that claim that BCMS is typologically one language & that's all. But, things are more complex than that, for: a) dialects-wise, BCSM are different languages; b) standard(ology)-wise, they're also different languages, from script to stylistics. What you seem to stick to is following: the "core" or basic grammar or typology of standard languages is the same. With a few exceptions, you're right. But here is the crucial point of differentiation: these languages's identities are not reducible to the linguistic typology of standard languages. I- or eminent Croatian linguists, whom I've read- do not deny that typologically-structurally BCSM have virtually the same basic grammar of standard languages. The point is that they differ, significantly, in other areas that are more vital for language identity than elementary textbook grammar, or as Dalibor Brozović had said- invoking a sort of marxist metaphor- the base (essential grammar) is the same, but the superstructure (accentuation, word-formation, higher syntax, stylistics, greater part of the lexicon, especially scientific and tehnical terminology, phraseology,..) is different. As I've said: your (or the authors's you refer to) approach is a reductionist one- as if a human body anatomy and physiology would be reduced to the skeleton, dismissing endocrine, vascular, nervous,..systems. These BCSM languages, save the basic grammar, don't have anything more in common, from word formation to terminology, higher syntax and stylistics, which can be used in any normal human situation. As they speak, the speakers are clearly identified as being either X or Y; the same with written text, whether literary or scientific (mathematics, medicine, physics, psychology, linguistics,..). Here are eminent textbooks that are in use in Croatian language description (I don't whether you'll be able to read the info, but, whatever..): 1) accentuation: http://www.globus.hr:8080/bookshop/Book.htm?sp=1023 , 2) morphology & word-formation: http://www.globus.hr:8080/bookshop/Book.htm?sp=264 , 3) syntax: http://www.globus.hr:8080/bookshop/Book.htm?sp=445 I'd sum the differences of your (and mainly English-language linguists) approach & position vis-a-vis mine (and mainly Croatian, Russian, German and Polish linguists): a) typologically-structurally BCSM is one "entity". You claim that this entity, a "squeezed out" basic grammar is a "langauge". I aver that this is not a language, but an abstract entity common to the aforementioned languages, and that no serious (or hilarious, for that matter) text or speech can be written or spoken in this entity, without being written either as Croatian or Bosnian or ... In short: this reductionist approach has stripped the notion of human language of any realistic content. What is an abstract umbrella covering true individual languages, here is presented as a true blood individual language. And, this is false. Language is not a basic grammar, neither for classification purposes only.Mir Harven (talk) 15:02, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

So, from a) on- prove it & stop selling ISO politics as linguistics. - No Mir Harven you stop selling language politics as linguistics! The differences among Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian/Montenegrin national standards are next-to-trivial from a linguistic standpoint (much lesser in terms of lexis&grammar than e.g. national varieties of English, German, Spanish, Portuguese..), and present zero communication obstacle to speakers. Serbo-Croatian (BCS(M), Štokavian, CSSD, whatever you'd like to call it) is still taught as a single course on almost all of the world's universities (except in their respective countries, of course, where the existence of other national standards of the very same language is conveniently ignored). In Slavic academic circles worldwide Serbo-Croatian is even more firmly entrenched. If you don't believe, I suggest that you download papers by some of the participants of top-notch conferences such as IWoBA. We don't need to "prove" you anything, only follow the usual practice of the rest of the planet for the last 2 centuries that you strive to belittle so much. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:12, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Proving by way of Wikipedia:Verifiability is actually really necessary. I've taken another look at the two articles, and I see relatively few actual references for the use of "Serbo-Croatian" as a current title - this could be the result of vandalism, but then that in turn needs to be checked. Surely some precise citations can be provided for these things like courses, academic circles, IWoBA, etc. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:27, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Google Scholar and books.google.com is your friend. Most of the relevant papers can be found on Web in PDF format. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 12:51, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

That link lists a bibliographic entry for a German book "Die kroatische Sprache und der Serbokroatismus" by one Leopold Auburger. That makes it easy to copy the relevant metadata in citations - please do that. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:43, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Kwamikagami, please, don't mess into things you don't understand. You think that you know more about certain language than its maternal speakers, who, BTW, have learned about their mother tongue in elementary school and high school, not just as kind of vanity hobby on some internet project?
Kwamikagami, did you have Croatian language as a school subject four hours weekly for 12 years? I did. Did you?
BTW, do you know how all Croat children and teens called their mother tongue and school subject? "Hrvatski", not "hrvatskosrpski", and especially not "srpskohrvatski".
AFAIS, Croatian's not your mother tongue.
Please, don't degrade yourself with edits like these [1].
Kwamikagami, imao sam 5 iz hrvatskog. A ti? Kubura (talk) 04:27, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Kubura, please don't mess with things that you don't understand. Serbo-Croatian is my mother tongue, I was taught it as a subject in 12 years of schooling in Croatia, with highest marks. That language which is taught in Croatian schools as hrvatski is the same language as Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin schools - standard form of Neoštokavian in English commonly called Serbo-Croatian. Kwamikagami is 100% correct in his reasoning, and what you're trying to do is give false impression of the reality. Cheers. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:02, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Štambuk, if you've lived and attended schools in Croatia, you're lieing. Serbo-Croatian has never been the school subject in Croatia (neither in Yugoslavia, neither later). Don't misuse Wikipedia promote your fixation. Croatian is not the same as so-called Serbo-Croatian. Matasović, the author you've been citeing, explicitly said the Serbo-Croatian never existed Srpsko-hrvatski nikada nije ostvaren, jer nije postojao. Taj je jezik bio projekt u glavama skupine lingvista i mnogih političara. Read, Štambuk. Read. You've personally said that Matasović is "greatest living Croatian comparativist"[2]. Please, don't disrupt. Read WP:DISRUPT. Kubura (talk) 02:53, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Kubura, what I was taught in school (primary and secondary) was a subject called hrvaski jezik "Croatian language". The actual language that I was taught there is the same language that other people call "Bosnian language" and "Serbian language". You're an old lad Kubura: when you went to school in Communist times, you were taught a subject called hrvatskosrpski jezk "Serbo-Croatia language". So please quit BS-ing, OK?

As for Matasović: he argues that SC never existed as a "unified stanard". Well, nether did English, Spanish, Portuguese...yet no one in the world treats their respective national varieties as "different languages". Matasović himself stated that on the language of real linguistics (dialectologic-genetic grouping), B/C/S are undoubtedly all one language. I know it's quite difficult for a brainwashed nationalist like you to understand that, but please try harder, I'm sick of explaining it over and over again. --Ivan Štambuk (talk)

I've also found that natives speakers are often quite unaware of the workings of their own language, as they are guided by intuition rather than by study. I found this when teaching English, and I still often find that non-native English speakers have a better understanding of why we have certain constructions in English than I do. For me it's automatic; for them, they had to consciously study every detail. Also, if I were raised with a family, school, and nation that said I spoke "American", I might vociferously object to the idea that I spoke "English". But that wouldn't mean that the words I'm writing now aren't English, despite my use of American spelling. — kwami (talk) 18:34, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Kwamikagami, compare what you've deleted [3].
Kwamikagami, please, don't compare American school system with Croatian. Average Croatian pupil has more and wider knowledge than the American, because, AFAIK, Croatian educational system has bigger and wider coverage, American system is more focused. Americans don't learn Croatian in schools, contrary to Croatian children (obligatory subject). Also, remember the case of geography. Kubura (talk) 02:53, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Please, read [4] (Leopold Auburger: Autor (Auburger) je poptuno točan i u definiciji nepostojećega srpskohrvatskog jezika. Taj je metajezik (pajezik, veli Auburger) izrastao u prvom redu kao sredstvo srpskoga ekspanzionizma. Kao živa jezična činjenica, srpskohrvatski nikada nije postojao, ali je postojao kao virtualna slika, propisni model i jezičnopolitička namjera serbokroatističkih zagovaratelja. "Za tu sliku", kaže, "serbokroatistički jezikoslovci bili su spremni pogaziti osnovna načela znanstvenoga rada." Pa su stvorili – krivotvorine.). Kubura (talk) 02:53, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm not comparing school systems. I'm reverting your censorship of Croatian being a Serbo-Croatian language. — kwami (talk) 03:42, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

It seems that UNESCO has dumped Serbo-Croatian notion, too. While I don't quite follow their chronology, this is how the they classify the languages in their Index Translationum

a) "mother page" (sort of): http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransList.a?lg=0

b) "TOP 10" Authors translated for a given original language http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransForm.a?f=sl&VL1=A&top=10&lg=0&t=TOP+10+Authors+translated+for+a+given+original+language

c) then, let's pick languages:

• Bosnian http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransStat.a?VL1=A&top=10&sl=BOS&lg=0

• Croatian http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransStat.a?VL1=A&top=10&sl=HRV&lg=0

• Croatian, dialects of http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransStat.a?VL1=A&top=10&sl=HRV-DI&lg=0

• Serbian http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransStat.a?VL1=A&top=10&sl=SRP&lg=0

• Serbo- Croatian (to 1992) http://databases.unesco.org/xtrans/stat/xTransStat.a?VL1=A&top=10&sl=HBS&lg=0

As I see, there is no Serbo-Croatian after 1992., even for UNESCO. Other tables are interesting, too, and worth checking. Mir Harven (talk) 10:14, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

The db doesn't seem to be running. But what does this have to do with the discussion here? Yes, the official name of the language is 'Croatian'. I don't think anyone has disputed that. But Croatian is part of a diasystem called 'Serbo-Croatian'.

UNESCO is a political organization, not a linguistic one, and so has to play politics. Croatia would throw a fit if UNESCO were to call their language SC, so of course they don't. Utterly irrelevant to the classification of the language, which is not dictated by politics.

I'm curious as to what will happen with translations if Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro are admitted to the EU. The other countries aren't going to want to pay for four translations when one would do just as well, yet national pride will dictate that each country demand a translation in its own language. Changing a name is cheap; producing tons of redundant documentation is not. I suspect that they will compromise on some jargony name which does not recall Yugoslavia and which each nation can say is its national language, perhaps with national distinctions given as alternates, like US/UK "elevator/lift" in English, especially if they have to pay for all it themselves, but it will be interesting to watch. — kwami (talk) 10:39, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Language classification is a political decision, not a linguistic one. To rephrase Talleyrand, language is too complex an issue to be left to linguists alone (vide war and generals). UNESCO has stated a simple truth: a dated umbrella term- dated - which has been in use till 1992.due to political pressures of Yugoslav serbocroatianism ideology- just fell. Fell like communism & Berlin wall. After 1992. no papers, books, whatever,..have been published in "Serbo-Croatian", which can be considered not a dead tongue, but a dead concept the "world" had found to be temporarily useful, just like geocentric system or Boasian anthropology. Finito. And this finito should be finally accepted by wiki, an encyclopaedia that is becoming more & more stultified & ultimately dated. With this approach, it will probably go the way of scholasticism or Aristotelian physics. Well, this will not in any way affect the status and profile of Croatian. At last, we're completely free to shape our language policy and future. Mir Harven (talk) 00:23, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Language classification is a political decision, not a linguistic one - Uhm, no it's not. That what you'd like it to be, because political classification is the only way one can speak of separate "Croatian language". Linguists you many different types of criteria to classify languages, and in not a single one of them can modern Croatian Ijekavian Neoštokavian standard be "detached" from Neoštokavian standards of Bosnian and Serbian. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 08:43, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

So in 1992 20 million people suddenly "stopped" speaking Serbo-Croatian, and started uttering Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian instead? Haha, what a Babel-like miracle must have happened then. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 21:48, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Miracle happened when they started speaking it. Croats speak their language for more than a millenium and they never called it S-C. This name was imposed and maintained by force and great serbian ideology. Since this ideology was defeated (Thank to the Lord and all Croats that died against this ideology and language) there is not a single reason for such a term. All other mutually understandable languages do not have an umbrella term (Norwego-Swedish-Denish or Bulgaro-Macdonian or similar), so why would these two have? BTW, Scandinavian languages developed in different forms of mutual states for more than 1000 years and they never thought of "umbrella language". Umbrella language is the biggest nonsence ever said by someone. Language is language. Umbrella is umbrella. Hammer of Habsburg (talk) 23:54, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

That's just nonsense. You don't have a clue what you're talking about. People didn't suddenly change the way they speak, although during the Tuđman's dictatorship there were lots of extreme intents to make them so (one of the Supreme Court judges even proposed a bill to "punish" everyone who didn't speak "proper Croatian"). Absolutely nothing has changed.The books that had hrvatskosrpski in their title were simply renamed to hrvatski, and content remained the same. Croats have been using the term Serbo-Croatian ever since it was coined 2 centuries, at first even more than Serbs. All the most prominent figures of Illyrian movement have embraced it, as well as all the prominent 20th-century writers. Croats didn't exist 1000 years ago (at least nothing in form of modern-day self-styled Croats): those people spoke plethora of various languages, mostly Slavic and Romance dialects. Croats today overwhelmingly speak Štokavian (Serbo-Croatian) as it was codified 150 years ago. Only 2 centuries ago, most of the people on the territory of today's Croatia did not speak Ijekavian Neoštokavian. There is no linguistic criterion under which people in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Beograd and Podgorica speak 4 "different languages". They're not even different dialects, so it remains unfathomable how could they possibly be different "languages". You need to check your history books (preferably: pre-1990s), and disregard all that nationalist twaddle. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 08:30, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

You obviously are quite selective. The real dictators were in power during the official existance of SC language. Tudjman was not a dictator of any kind (dictator is someone who represes political opponents, lives in a single-party system or represses political counterparts). These would include Serbian royal family and Tito. So, dictators were the ones supporting the SC by force and the guy enjoying support on free elections cannot be named a dictator. Take an example of Italy. Even though official language is Italian, there is a dozen of languages spoken by its inhabitants. These would include, for example, Sicilian, Sardinian, Venetian, Piedmontese etc.... Now, in Italy, these languages are not considered dialects of the umbrella Italian language. They are surely mutually understandeable but still, they are languages on their own. Italians didn't have dictatorship for such a long time like in the case of south slavs, so that explains why Italians call these languages and some remnants of the dictatorship in Yugoslavia (first and second one) name these languages as dialects of a general language of the autocracy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hammer of Habsburg (talk • contribs) 12:54, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Tuđman was classical iron-fist dictator who persecuted journalists, fabricated election results, orchestrated large-scale theft of people's property (pretvorba & privatizacija, famoznih "200 obitelji"), brought sanctions and isolation to his country, sponsored paramilitary troops who killed innocent civilians and built death camps.... A perfect counterpart to his dear personal friend Slobodan Milošević. Today he's generally viewed as a shameful historical figure, and will undoubtedly be put by historians in the same traitor-pile as Pavelić and others, when the time comes. During the period of his rule, personal freedoms were significantly reduced, and public servants were careful in selecting "pure" words in speech and writing, no to provoke backlash from nationalism-minded censors. Hopefully, those horrible times are over now.

The notion of a single literary language called Serbo-Croatian came long before any dictator institutionalized it. Almost a century before Titoist Yugoslavia. It did not come politically prescribed, but grassroots-organized, on a voluntary basis of free individuals associating themselves on the basis of their own free will. No one really pressurized great figures of Croatian Nationalist Revival to come together with their Serbian and Slovenian colleagues in Vienna Literary Agreement. The "officialization" came much, much later, when the Neoštokavian idiom was already firmly established as a literary language.

Your comparisons with Italy are pointless and irrelevant: Čakavian, Kajkavian an Štokavian speeches are 1000 times more mutually different than all those Italian languages/dialects combined, and yet Croatian language fundamentalists still forcibly cal them "one language", while at the same time nearly-identical standard Bosnian and Serbian are "different" from standard Croatian. Far-fetched analogies inapplicable to the real world. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:37, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

You're missing the point. Mir Haven said that SC existed until 1992 and ceased to exist after that point, as evidenced by UNESCO terminology. Ivan was ridiculing that. As for "umbrella languages", by your argument we need to delete all mention of "Slavic". "Slavic" is, after all, just an umbrella term for Bulgarian-Croatian-Polish-Russian.

No, I'm saying that SC has never existed, but that even crusty institutions like UNESCO had been forced to pursue an uneasy compromise- while not having the guts to admit that SC has never been a language in any meaningful way, they chose the least expensive & contradictory cop-out: it was-for them- a language that ceased to exist in 1992. Even this grudging admission has an unequivocal repercussion: there is no SC "umbrella" now, 2010. End of story. Mir Harven (talk) 00:30, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

BTW, there are other umbrella terms for mutually intelligible languages: NSD is called "Continental Scandinavian", among other things; Hindi-Urdu is called "Hindustani", BM is "ESS" (or sometimes just "Bulgarian"), etc. Not all such nodes have established names, but Serbo-Croatian does; it is in common usage in English, and therefore we use it when writing in English. — kwami (talk) 00:09, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

Things are not the way you present them to be. "Hindustani" is obsolete, and other terms (ESS, for instance, has been accepted as is WSS, but not "Serbo-Croatian", since two levels of meaning do not overlap: dialectal continuum & standard language. There is no standard Hindustani; the same with standard Eastern South Slavic. But, with re-introduction of "Serbo-Croatian", discredited both as a notion referring to dialectal continuum & the standard language, the whole superstructure has collapsed, and there is no way out other than to erase the hateful term. As a standard language- this has never existed, as was proved zillion times (elementary grammar textbooks was the best "argument" SC fans could offer); as a dialectal continuum, it is even more bizarre, since no one but Croats speaks Čakavian, Kajkavian and part of Štokavian dialects. So, your central contention is this: we (the US or UK institutions, I guess) use the cover term SC. This is not true, and you have not offered the proof that it was. On the contrary, English language institutions superseding in authority any country- like UNESCO- have dropped the SC label; so did the US Library of Congress; vast majority of textbooks, grammars and dictionaries with English as an entry (Pimsleur, Norton,.) teach Croatian as an individual language, and "SC" is mentioned only to explain past interpretations of language history. Simply, there is no standard "SC" in use even in international institutions (communicating mainly in English), nor is it treated as a human language in full (either dialects or standard), nor you can prove this- and this is the end of conversation for any rational and informed person. Mir Harven (talk) 10:33, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

You obviously don't understand the discussion. Continental scandinavian is not a language of any kind. This is a group of languages. And the secont thing is: who is "WE" that you are refering to? I know many other "WEs" who never used such an expression. Your approach is extremely biased and nonscientific (not to say naive). The fact that something is used by someone does not mean that it is correct in any way. People kill other people in english-speaking countries and this is not accepted as something normal in english-speaking countries by many of its inhabitants. You better change your argumentation.Hammer of Habsburg (talk) 21:35, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

We as in "Wikipedia". We as in linguistically-competent Wikipedians not having an identity stake in the discussion.

You're not linguistically- competent Wikipedian- at least when Croatian language is concerned. I won't bother about your motives, but the clear fact is you are an ignoramus about Croatian language standardization, history etc. Mir Harven (talk) 10:50, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm a native speaker of Serbo-Croatian language, who has had 12 years of formal schooling in its Croatian variety (with the highest marks), and who also has (had) amateur interest in comparative/historical linguistics and dialectology, esp. of Slavic languages. I'm also a native speaker of Neštokavian dialect - which most of the Croats of Croatia are not. I've read lots of books and papers on the topic, and have a firm grasp of foreign scholarship on the issue. Also, as far as I can see, I'm one of the two persons here not trying to argue on the basis of politics, and politically-intonated statements. I'm ready to except reasonable criticism of any of my claims, and change them accordingly if presented with indisputable counter-evidence. Sadly, I've seen none so far, only a bunch of pointless ad-hominems such as yours above. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:16, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

The fact that something is used by an overwhelming majority of Slavists, it remains "true enough" for Wikipedia. We cannot simply ignore centuries of academic practice just because some nationalists switched their terminology in their mother countries. From the perspective of the rest of the world, really nothing has changed.

Another lie. The "overwhelming majority" of Slavicists, both Croatian and non- Croatian, have dumped the term SC. You even don't know who these Slavicists are, and what's their professional "weight", so to speak. Your entire effort here is not much than an exercise in demagoguery. Mir Harven (talk) 10:50, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

So far I've cited them some half-a-dozen times to you (I wonder do you actually get back to my retorts?!). The term Serbo-Croatian is still overwhelmingly used by historical linguists and dialectologists world-wide. It is used, for example, i Rick Derksen's 2008 Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon (the most recent etymological dictionary of Slavic languages; the first decent substitute for Vasmer-Trubačev's Этимологический словарь русского языка & Этимологический словарь славянских языко - both of which use also use the term Serbo-Crotian). It is is also used in books and papers by prominent Slavists and Indo-Europeanists such as Vladimir Dybo, Frederik Kortlandt, Jay Jasanoff, Wayles Browne..all of the IWoBA participants that I've seen except for Croatian (Kapović and Matasović). Serbo-Croatian is taught as one language and almost all world's foreign universities, and all English-level textbooks written by foreigners still treat it as such (e.g. Magner's Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language, Alexander's Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a grammar: with sociolinguistic commentary etc.). Also, you seem to be obsessed by the term itself - the term itself is irrelevant, it's what it means that matters. And it refers to to the same shared core - Neoštokavian dialect, today standardized in 3 (soon 4) national varieties with trivial differences. We might as well use BCS or B/C/S in place of Serbo-Croatian - it wouldn't make much of a difference. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:16, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

And BTW, "Croatian language" as a number of Croatian linguist like to define it along ethnic lines, as something composed of "Čakavian, Kajkavian, Štokavian speeches used by Croats", is not a language either. You cannot simply selectively apply one type of criteria when discussing Serbo-Croatian, and other when discussing Croatian. If SC is an "umbrella term", so is "Croatian"; but even then, it makes much more sense to speak of SC than of C. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 08:40, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

This is so meaningless that you even don't know what you're trying to tell. I'll do it for you. Dialects spoken by Croats (Čalavian, parts of Štokavian, Kajkavian) are not "a language", but they need not be one: the cover terms like "Western South Slavic", "Eastern South Slavic", "Slavic" are not languages- just cover terms some participants in these discussion (kwami etc.) try to present as "must be" umbrellas in the linguistic staircase. Ignoramus & Yugo-chauvinist, as before. Mir Harven (talk) 10:50, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Can we stick to the point? It's utterly irrelevant whether tyrants promoted SC. It's irrelevant whether Croats will accept the term. What's relevant is English usage. That's what needs to be addressed. If there is political controversy over a term, then we address it. We don't censor it from the encyclopedia because someone dislikes it. After all, you can find someone who dislikes nearly everything on WP. There may be Serbs who object to presenting Croatian as a separate language. Shall we therefore delete this article and redirect to Serbian? Of course not, because "Croatian" is commonly used in English. So is Serbo-Croation. — kwami (talk) 13:02, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

"What's relevant is English usage". Well, read what I wrote in response to your text on Talk (a few steps back in history) & you'll see that- I'm arguing- your contention about widely accepted usage of SC term is not corroborated by data. Mir Harven (talk) 14:10, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Čakavian and Kajkavian are usually referred to as nar(j)ečja in native terminology, a term which doesn't have an exact counterpart in English language but can be roughly translated as "dialect clusters". They are radically different from Štokavian dialect(s), in terms of phonology, inflection, vocabulary. In their "pure" form (i.e. in those obscure areas outside influence of extensive Štokavianization) they are usually completely unintelligible to Štokavian speakers. In all the imaginable definitions of a language, they should be treated as different languages. But along ethnic lines, they are usually not.

Western South Slavic and Eastern South Slavic are terms from genetic linguistics - some 1100-1000 years ago there where Proto-Western-South-Slavic and Proto-Easter-South-Slavic speech communities that shared several common exclusive innovations (isoglosses). They didn't last very much. They're not relevant in the discussion here and I'm not sure why exactly do you mention them. I assure you that these two are not "umbrellas".

Also please terminate your inflammatory personal attacks and accusations. I as well might be ignormus compared to someone else, but I'm pretty sure that's not you. I am certainly not a "Yugo-chauvinist", because I personally find all totalitarian regimes despicable (I'm a big fan of minarchism & minimal constitutional government). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:16, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

We don't need to continue with this debate. When one side accords with encyclopedic standards, and the other resorts to name calling, there really isn't much point in repeating ourselves. — kwami (talk) 02:15, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Oh, don't you say ? You were "oblivious" to Štambuk's name-calling of those who disagreed with his "Yugo-linguistics" projects on wiki, his manipulation & misrepresentation of language sources, and very partial -that is to say, dismissive about critiques of your approach to the subject you barely know anything about. Well, this subject deserves much more nuanced analysis, since both outsiders and marginal insiders to the field try to impress their limited outlook on the the whole area. Mir Harven (talk) 11:03, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Few notes about Croatian and Serbian language and mutual intelligibility

I've made some small dictionary about different but often used Croatian and Serbian words. They are not understandable to people who didn't learn so called Serbo-Croatian language, and by that I mean Serbian language. They today have 26 years. Just to remember, when this "one Yugoslav nation with three tribal names" ideology started to pull of this linguistical blasfemy in Kingdom of Yugoslavia, language was called Serbo-Croato-Slovene. In original plans Bulgarians were supposed to join Yugoslavia and become Serbs with this artificial language like Venetians became Italians but they were too big and powerful to assimilate so that failed in the very beginning.

[...]

Just for note, no matter what it writes in the article, I strongly suggest that nobody who visits Croatia says to some Croat that his language is some Serbo-Croatian language. It is as stupid like shouting Heil Hitler in Tel Aviv.

Sulejman (talk) 18:29, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Deleted the fluff that does not make this a better article.

We all know there are different words. No-one in the US understands flat/apartment, lift/elevator, pram/baby carriage, fag/cigarette, bonnet/hood, etc etc etc etc either, unless they're exposed to British English. That's what a separate language standard means. — kwami (talk) 18:42, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

You must be joking. Bosnian and Serbian TV shows are regularly being broadcasted on Croatian TV channels (and vice versa), without subtitles. How do you imagine that people understand them if they're so "different" ? On e.g. Operacija trijumf you had Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian audience (mostly teenagers and 20-something youth) and hosts, all communicating without any difficulties. How could that be? Stop manufacturing lies and misleading poor English readers into fabricated history. It's not funny. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 19:02, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Wow, censorship on a talk page. Reminds me on the old days, in Communism. Paranoia is obviously kicking in. If you want to make this article better I suggest that you delete yourself.

Sulejman (talk) 19:14, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Get over it. Talk pages are for improving the article, not essays and personal research.

BTW, as for your Croatian-Ukrainian "language", of course it exists. We call it Slavic. You deny Slavic? I gave denial of Slavic as an ironic extension of the denial of SC, and here it is! — kwami (talk) 19:24, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Question for Kwamikagami

I've posted this previously on Kwamikagami's talkpage, now I've made similar question here in the case that Kwamikagami ignores the attempt to peacefully discuss this matter. Things that occur on his talkpage might remain hidden from other participants, therefore, I've posted that here also.
Kwamikagami, are you serious [5]? Man, have you ever been living in Croatia? You think that that's not an insult for Croats and that that name doesn't carry negative conotations for Croats?
Maybe you or your family wasn't persecuted and imprisoned for opposing to so-called Serbo-Croatian.
Permanent reverting is not the solution. We have to seriously discuss and solve this.
Budući da se smatraš autoritetom za područje hrvatskog jezika, onda moraš znati govoriti i pisati taj jezik, njegovu povijest te političke progone i pokušaje zatiranja hrvatskog jezika, pa možeš razgovarati sa mnom na hrvatskom jeziku. Kad si već toliki stručnjak za hrvatski, moraš ga i znati. Znaš li kad se prvi put spominje ime hrvatskog jezika i u kojem obliku? Tko je otac hrvatske književnosti? Kako se hrvatski jezik zvao kroz povijest? Znaš li na kojem su jeziku pisali AVNOJ-eve dokumente? Koje se jezike izričito navelo da se na njima mora pisati AVNOJ-eve dokumente? Znaš li zašto su hrvatski kulturni djelatnici donijeli Deklaraciju o Deklaracija o nazivu i položaju hrvatskog književnog jezika? Znaš li kakvim su pritiscima bili izloženi ti ljudi od strane vlastiju? Je li ti poznato hrvatsko jezikoslovno nazivlje? Znaš li kad je i zašto je uvedena nagrada dr Ivan Šreter i zašto ta nagrada nosi to ime?
Kwamikagami, feel free to answer here, if you don't want to answer on your talkpage. Kubura (talk) 03:11, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I'll repeat my answer from there.

I'm sorry if your family was persecuted over some state-sponsored idiocy. But that's irrelevant to an encyclopedia. The name is not controversial in English, and does not carry negative connotations for linguists, so your edit was factually incorrect. When I've mentioned these changes in linguistic circles here on WP, support for the term SC has been unanimous. (Also, the phrase "Croats and other linguists" makes no sense, since Croats are not in general linguists.) The only opposition has been from outside linguistics and then only from Croats who carry the baggage srpskohrvatski has in Croatian over to English. That's attempting to set up a 'walled garden', and is no more acceptable here than Greeks demanding that we not call the country of Macedonia by its name.

We can't cater to the sensitivities of Macedonians, Greeks, Turks, Croats, Albanians, Israelis, Palestinians, Taiwanese, Tibetans, Chinese, or anyone else, because there's no end to it. If there is a general avoidance of a certain term in the lit because of such sensitivities, then we reflect that. But AFAIK no-one has yet come up with a good, commonly accepted euphemism for SC. If you find such a term, please bring it to our attention, and we can discuss replacing SC with it. — kwami (talk) 05:47, 25 May 2010 (UTC)

Kubura, how people "perceive" their mother tongue has nothing to do with the fact if their mother tongue is the same or different language as a mother tongue of some other people, esp. people of different nationality. You are politicizing an issue which has nothing to do with politics. Croats can call their language hrvatski for billion years, Serbs can call their srpski and Bosnians bosanski, but as long as as they're 100% mutually intelligible, all being based on stylized literary Neoštokavian, it is the same language. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:58, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

So, in your logic Nazism is perfectly acceptable system for Sweden or for Switzerland because they didn't suffer under it, and issues that Nazis had with Jews and other nations are irrelevant. Yeah, right. When somebody goes to SCR wikipedia what can he see? We have copied articles from Croatian wiki on Croatian language and from Serbian wiki on Serbian language. The difference is quite obvious. They even have Croatian words for months in Cyrillic script and Serbian in Latin, although people went to jail for using Croatian month names in Yugoslavia. What a morbid perversion. If somebody wants to make an article on so-called "Serbocroatian" from Croatian or Serbian article he must change the whole article, from words to semantic in some provisional way because nobody really knows how proper "Serbocroatian" text should look like. That is because "Serbocroatian language" is a political project made for destroying South Slavic nations and merging them into Yugoslavs and then Serbs, which failed in blood and genocide. Croats have paid very high blood toll to preserve Croatian language and we will never accept some artificial language as predecessor of our native language written culture which is 910 years old, unlike "Serbocroatian" which is only 160 years old. So, the very thesis that "Serbocroatian" is some umbrella term for Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian language is incorrect. In Croatia nobody thinks that "Serbocroatian language" ever existed and we refer to our language as Croatian, explicitly noted first time in year 1288., and that language evolved from our written tradition like any other language. Bosniaks actually have some Serbocroatian mixture because they emerged as a nation from Islamized Croats and Serbs in Ottoman empire and their language is very serbianized but when they put their Turkish words in the text I cant understand nothing, that can be either Bosnian or Estonian language for what I care, while Serbs gladly accept the term "Serbocroatian" because their language was made from Vuk Karadžić 200 hundred years ago and it is based on Croatian written tradition since Serbs didn't have any under Ottomans. Must be the lack of paper for 500 years, I assume. That artificial political SCR language served them as a weapon for annihilating Croatian and other South Slavic cultures as a first step in serbianization (yugoslavization) and than creating Great Serbia in the next step (we prevented that in war 1991-1995). It is not the first time that tactic was used in history. Or probably the last time. That are the facts. You are currently abusing your status as an administrator to enforce some false facts and ideology over this and similar articles but nothing lasts forever. Virtual reality is for video games, not something that calls itself encyclopedia. Real life free from oppression and politics will effectively annihilate your "work". Sulejman (talk) 12:17, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

You are needlessly obnoxious. This has nothing to do with politics or Communism, but with a simple fact that what some nationalists today perceive as "standard Croatian", "standard Bosnian" & "standard Serbian" are in fact three national varieties of the same idiom - Neoshtokavian, still known by the name of Serbo-Croatian in much of the civilized world. They share 99% of their grammar and at least 95% of lexis, with trivial and regular differences, and are by any imaginable criteria of "language" the same language. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:54, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Ivan, as much as I appreciate your insightful and always well-informed comments,--and your calm manner when dealing with the ridiculous,--the word 'language' does have more than one meaning even within linguistics. There's the dialectal meaning, in which BCMS are clearly a single language (or if they're not, then it's Chakavian that is a distinct language from Croatian, not Croatian from Serbian), but there's also the sociolinguistic use of the term, where language identity is informed by ethnic identity. In most cases around the world there's also a dialectal difference, even if that's not enough on its own to define a distinct language, as with Bulgarian and Macedonian, or Dutch, Afrikaans, and Flemish, etc, but there are other cases where "languages" are nearly indistinguishable, as with Hindi and Urdu, where interviews have demonstrated that native speakers using the colloquial register literally can't tell the difference. That is, Hindi speakers think that Urdu speakers from the same city are speaking Hindi, and vice versa, but nonetheless because they are official standards and have distinct technical registers, we continue to speak of them as "languages". In this case, Chakavian is sociolinguistically part of Croatian, but not of Serbian, so the SC languages can also be distinguished by that criterion. So I have no problem with this article remaining where it is, as "Croatian language", and with discussing the sociolinguistic dimensions of Croatian, just as long as we're clear to the reader that the distinction is sociolinguistic and not dialectological. — kwami (talk) 21:10, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

You again mix various levels. Speaking of dialects, there are no langauges we call Croatian, Serbian,...nor constructs like BCS, "Serbo-Croatian" etc. There are Čakavian, Štokavian and Kajkavian dialects- Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin encompassing various sub-dialects of Štokavian only, while Croatian is composed of Čakavian, Kajkavian, plus various sub-dialects of Štokavian. On the standard languages level- there are only Croatian, Serbian,... and not any quasi-cover standard language, be it called BSC, CBSM, Serbo-Croatian, Croato-Serbian, whatever. Simply, both as a system of dialects, and as standard languages- no such thing as SC, CBS, BMCS,..As a notable Croatian linguist Miro Kačić has observed (in his "Croatian and Serbian: Delusions and Distortions"): "I have shown that Croatian and Serbian differ to a greater or lesser degree on all levels. These differences exist on the following ones:

1. the level of literary language. There are two traditions of writing which are temporally and spatially separated due to the different historical, cultural and literary development of the two nations.

2. The level of standard language. The two traditions of linguistic codification are completely disparate. The period of Croato- Serbian normative convergence, from the time of Croatian "Vukovians" to the imposed unification of these two languages in the former Yugoslavia, is only an interval in the development of the Croatian linguistic norm. As a turning point, this period was atypical with respect to three centuries of this development.

3. The level of genetic relatedness. Croatian is based on three dialects, while Serbian is dominated by a single dialect (with the exception of the peripheral Torlak idiom). The interference betwen three Croatian dialects which provided the basis for Croatian writing and literature has uninterruptedly existed for centuries as a formative force in the codification of standard Croatian.

4. The typological level. Differences exist on all levels of the linguistic system: phonetic/phonological, accentual, morphological, word-formational, syntactic, semantic-pragmatic and lexical. Linguistic systems which differ on all these levels cannot be one language. Mir Harven (talk) 13:54, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, if there is no difference why so much effort in both Yugoslavias to create one single SCR language? The struggle itself is a proof enough that those languages are not the same and SCR construct is artificial. And now I have to believe that some poor language with the same linguistic value as Slovianski is an umbrella term for Croatian? Where was that umbrella for Croatian štokavian literature before Vuk Karadžić? Where was it when Bartol Kašić translated the Bible on Croatian štokavian in the early 17 century, which is practically the same language as today's Croatian? Where?

And that Pavle Ivić's "eastern Herzegovinian dialect", well that is a load of you know what. I dare you to show me one book which is written in that so called EH dialect that is not from Dubrovnik, written from Croats in Croatian language? As we all know there is no literature from Trebinje, Nevesinje, Gacko, Bileća, only Dubrovnik and Dubrovnik is Croatian. Pavle Ivić created that confusing blasfemy because eastern Herzegovina is settled with Serbs and he wanted to merge Croatian Dubrovnik into Serbian culture. Every educated linguist knows that people from Eastern Herzegovina don't speak like Croats in Dubrovnik.

And for that Neoštokavian, that is not a language. What the hell? Here, you can download Istarski razvod on Čakavian from the year 1275. It has 5,5 MB. If you know Croatian you will see that if you stylize language in that document to Neoštokavian Ijekavian form you will get pretty much today's Croatian language, some old words apart of course. Same thing is with Burgenland Croatian language which is Croatian language in Čakavian Ikavian stylization and some old grammar solutions, 99% understandable and much closer to Croatian language than Serbian. Croats accepted štokavian stylization because most Croats used Ikavian Štokavian and Ijekavian stylization because of rich literature from Dubrovnik, many found their style classy. What if we change that stylization into Čakavian Ikavian, would it mean that Croatian became different language? Of course not. Your arguments are completely wrong. And it is not correct that Croatian and Serbian differ in such a small percentage, in vocabulary that difference is up to 30% and in grammar, well Vuk Karadžić didn't have any grammars except Croatian to make his own. When I take Serbian text I cant understand every fifth word. I had to throw away Serbocroatian book about transformers from the eighties because it was hard to read and with many foreign terms for me. And just recently I learned what zvanično means. Now imagine how some 20 year old man sees and perceives all that. For him it is as close to Croatian as Slovenian. But, you guys are fanatics or paid by someone to continue this blasphemy, who cares about arguments when you from Japan know more than native speakers and professors... — Sulejman (talk) 22:25, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian language was not "created in Yugoslavia", because it predates it by a century. By the times Communist enforced unitary official language policy, it was de facto literary language. The "struggle" was chiefly against Croatian nationalists: NDH-sympathizers who endorsed extreme purisms promulgated by Pavelić's Hrvatski državni ured za jezik - neologisms coined for a singular reason: to make "Croatian" as distant as possible from "Serbian". Since it's basically impossible to force millions of people to change their speech significantly, the whole movement failed pitifully, and what was left was a bunch of nationalists who flirted with fascism by using such words, which Communists took as a offense and deliberate provocation and persecuted accordingly. Please don't twist historical facts.

Bartol's Kašić bible was written in lingua illyrica, not in "Croatian". Kašić certainly wasn't some Croatian nationalists as much as you'd like to believe it. At that time, only a tiny minority of "Croats" (I'm using quotations marks, because at that period there was not developed concept of a "nation" or "ethnicity") actually spoke Štokavian. Kašić wrote it in Štokavian so that the Bible could be intelligible to the widest range of people - which he openly states in the prologue. He doesn't call those people "Croats". In fact, some of them are insinuated to be Orthodox.

Every educated linguist knows that people from Eastern Herzegovina don't speak like Croats in Dubrovnik. - Every educated linguist knows that they speak the same dialect, the same subdialect. I suggest that you read some of the recent dialectology books on the subject. I suggest Srpski dijalekti by Miloš Okuka, and Hrvatski dijalekti i govori štokavskog narječja i hrvatski govori torlačkog narječja. by Josip Lisac. Both list Dubrovnik speech as a part of istočnohercegovačko-krajiški dijalekt. Your exhortations about Pavle Ivić are amusing, but irrelevant.

Istarski razvod is almost completely unintelligible to any modern-day Croatian speaker. Don't be tricked by the defective orthography: spoken 13th century (as well as pure modern) Čakavian has completely different phonology and accentuation. These letters don't represent sounds that you think they represent. In terms of divergence, they're at least as different from modern standard Croatian as modern English is from that of Chaucer. Unless you have some philological training, you can't understand much. In modern terms, Čakavian of Istarski razvod is t least as divergent from modern standard Croatian, as modern standard Croatian is from modern standard Slovenian or Macedonian.

I'm sorry, but your statement about Burgenland Croatian being closer to standard Croatian than standard Serbian is simply a blatant lie. In the example of Lord's prayer, the only difference from listed standard Croatian example and standard Ijekavian Serbian "translation" would be in use of word hljeb instead of kruh. Get real.

Croats accepted štokavian stylization because most Croats used Ikavian Štokavian and Ijekavian stylization because of rich literature from Dubrovnik, many found their style classy. - It's irrelevant why it was excepted. It is a matter of fact that it is excepted, and that the same Ijekavian Neoštokavian is used for modern standard Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin. It's the same subdialect of the same language. Historical "justifications" are irrelevant; what matters is the current state of affairs.

What if we change that stylization into Čakavian Ikavian, would it mean that Croatian became different language? - No, the change in long yat reflex ije > i is not a sufficient change in language structure. If the lexis and grammar (inflection and morphology) remained the same, it wouldn't make any difference at all.

When I take Serbian text I cant understand every fifth word. - Obnoxious lies. Serbian and Bosnian TV shows are regularly broadcasted on Croatian TV channels without subtitles, and vice versa. You're trolling ad your arguments are impotent and worthless. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 17:09, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

(kwami): "..but there's also the sociolinguistic use of the term, where language identity is informed by ethnic identity." - that is a political criterion based on the imaginary sense of identity. People don't "own" the language they speak. How they personally refer to it is interesting from sociological or anthropological perspective, but from linguistic/scientific perspective it's largely irrelevant. The problem is when you mix those two: some Croatian linguists define Croatian as "language spoken by Croats" (imaginary criterion of identity), and later use that term strictly as "Neoštkavian Ijekavian", which is ridiculous. Croatian is defined as one thing when it's necessary to make it "different" from Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin, and as a completely another thing when it's used to denote the practical standard as used in the books and media. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 17:18, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

That may very well be true (if fact, it's more or less my impression as an outsider), but since language is a human product, a scientific description needs to take the human element into account. Languages do not exist apart from the people who speak them, and many language boundaries are rather imaginary, not just those of SC. There is, after all, no real division between SC, Bulgarian, and Slovenian apart from ethnic identity, as there are no defining isoglosses apart from those which are subjectively chosen to correspond with ethnic identity, and even then I would assume that the match isn't very good. SC is unusual in that, like Hindustani, the standards are based on the same dialect, and therefore the differences are trivial compared to most other languages. And of course because of that the ELL2 conflates Serbian and Croatian into a single language article. I think we should do that with the grammar (incl. phonology), but the political and sociolinguistic aspects can easily stand on their own, and although we could merge them, IMO there isn't any particular need to do so. — kwami (talk) 18:30, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Interesting. How someone as clueless as you re Croatian and Serbian languages has the temerity to arbitrate on language issues ? Just to begin to understand what this-for you- utterly alien language is, I'll give a chronological survey link. I doubt anything more can be done except dumping wiki policy (and wikipedia as a project), for it allows such a travesty of articles editing. http://www.hercegbosna.org/STARO/engleski/croatian_language.html Mir Harven (talk) 12:43, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

The link you gave is to an article hosted on extremist Croatian nationalist website, that you personally wrote. Website's very title, Herceg-Bosna, betrays its extremist undertones: Greater Croatia carved by butchering Bosnia. Wikipedia's policy specifically excludes self-published material, especially the one self-hosted on some obscure websites. It would take a book to refute all the inaccuracies and misleadingly presented material in that article. (A good starter for the uninformed can be found here.) --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:30, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

Ideology of Serbocroatism

This ideology should be addressed in more detail since outsiders to the field, proponents of the ideology and others are, by selectively quoting selective sources - knowingly or just following the old school stuff, effectively are doing the job of rejuvenation of a discarded concept: a "Serbo-Croatian language". Let's see what it was & is:

• the term "Serbo-Croatian" (in English, as well as in Italian, German, French etc.) had appeared ca. 1830s and gained ground in 1870s- 1900s, most notably with Pero Budmani's grammar of "Serbo-Croatian" in Italian (1867.), http://books.google.hr/books?id=MS0tAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA82&dq=Budmani&lr=&cd=28#v=onepage&q&f=false and August Leskien's grammar in 1914. (a limited preview),http://books.google.hr/books?id=RuQcAAAAMAAJ&dq=Leskien&lr=&source=gbs_book_other_versions As can be seen, these textbooks (one can check closely Budmani's grammar) teach two languages, Croatian and Serbian, under the "Serbo-Croatian" umbrella term. There is nothing especially "English" in this languages naming- it just reflected dominant Serbocroatist approach which had been established in Slavicist circles (mainly in central Europe) ca. 1850s onwards. This ideology had been dominant virtually until the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1990s, with results:

a) it was virtually impossible to publish, especially in French, English, German etc. any serious linguistic study or book (dictionary, grammar, orthography, language history,..) on Croatian language as such. Political pressures kept the "SC" label as the normative term, and Croatian was either suppressed or marginalized. As is known, at the initiative of Serbian-Yugoslav king Alexander, US library of Congress had changed in 1930. separate Croatian and Serbian languages and literatures into one, "Serbo-Croatian". The eminent Croatian translator Mate Maras (who translated the complete Shakespeare and Rabelais) has written on this: http://www.matica.hr/Vijenac/vijenac392.nsf/AllWebDocs/Jos_o_priznanju_hrvatskoga_jezika [Kad sam 1999. počeo raditi u Hrvatskom veleposlanstvu kao kulturni ataše, u Kongresnoj su knjižnici radili Hrvati Šime Letina i Božo Bačak. Pripovijedali su mi koliko su se borili da se odmah uvedu čisti nacionalni kodovi. Navodili su i povijesni podatak da su se hrvatska i srpska književnost vodile pod nacionalnim imenima sve do godine 1930, kad je jugoslavenski kralj pismom zahtijevao od knjižnice da se umjesto tih dvaju jezika uvede srpsko-hrvatski. (Tu je činjenicu iznio i Radoslav Katičić nakon predavanja u Kongresnoj biblioteci koje je održao 1997.) Ali nije bilo uspjeha, višestruki otpori uvođenju oznake hrv još su bili prejaki.] (Who considers to intervene in Croatian language matters should understand what this means.) Alo, Croatian linguists were forced to publish works under "SC" title: examples are Josip Hamm's grammar in German: http://www.amazon.de/Grammatik-serbokroatischen-Sprache-Josip-Hamm/dp/3447008717 or Josip Matešić's dictionary: http://www.amazon.de/R%C3%BCckl%C3%A4ufiges-W%C3%B6rterbuch-Serbokroatischen-Halbbd-1/dp/B0000BSJ6K/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274096817&sr=1-7- significantly, the author changed the name of the language of his works in the thaw period of late 1980s: http://openlibrary.org/books/OL1517183M/Hrvatsko-njemački_frazeološki_rječnik (Croatian-German phraseological dictionary); http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=72723 (German-Croatian Universal Dictionary)

it was virtually impossible to publish, especially in French, English, German etc. any serious linguistic study or book (dictionary, grammar, orthography, language history,..) on Croatian language as such. Political pressures kept the "SC" label as the normative term - You expect us to believe this BS? What kind of "pressure" could possibly Communist Yugoslavia or its predecessors (SHS Kingdom, Austria-Hungary etc.), during which the term SC was abundantly in use, exert on countries such as United States, Soviet Russia or pre-WW2 Germany? Do you realize how crazy your conspiracy theory sounds? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 12:23, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Paranoia, eh ? Judging others from personal experiences ? Btw, where are guardians of civil discourse now ? Somehow I don't see anyone. Now, to address this little disruption: the term SC has become dominant in the period of the 2nd half of the 19th century, mainly as an effort of Austrian geopolitics which sought to unite Croatian (mainly called Illyrian (1830s, 1850s) and Croatian (1860s on); the only exception being Yugoslav Academy dictionary (1878.+) and Maretić's grammar (1899.) which used the term "Croatian or Serbian")- the term "Serbo-Croatian" wasn't in use in Croatia) and Serbian (generally named Serbian, with a few sporadic exceptions) into one language that would facilitate Austria's dominance (cultural, economic, political, commercial,..) in South-Eastern Europe area, linking Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina (within the borders of Habsburg empire) to the sovereign countries of Serbia and Montenegro. Since Austrian Slavic studies have been pre-eminent in Europe (and the world), the rest of the world simply accepted Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) definitions & delineations of South Slavic languages which lay (mainly) within the A-U borders. Additional factor was the then dominant neo-grammarian philological school which used to look at languages from positivistic-empirical standpoint & tried to reduce languages to a few simple principles and descriptions, mainly phonetics and basic grammar. It didn't pay much attention to the subtleties that were later the defining notions of Ausbau or cultural languages- basic grammar was the beginning and the end of all. This had solidified the notion of one SC language in the period prior to WW1. During the interwar period & after the WW2, Yugoslavia- both the royalist and the Communist one- has been one of the pillars of the Versailles and Yalta Europe, and the dominant forces didn't want to perturb the stability of Yugoslavias. Hence, anything that would threaten- or seemed to threaten- Yugoslavia's "integrity" was either dismissed, minimized or glossed over, form Stjepan Radić's assassination to the Kosovo Albanian revolt(s). As far as culture was concerned, all steps that would seem to erode the perceived Yugoslav "unity" were spurned or blocked. One of the supposed "glues" of Yugoslavia was its (un)official language, SC (during royal Yugoslavia sometimes called Serbo-Croatian- Slovene) which has been treated by dominant policy planners, both "East" and "West", as one of the crucial elements of Yugoslav stability. Should this "language" dissolve or split (or ceased to be looked on as one language)- the perceived Yugoslav unity would be at stake. So, the combination of mid-19th century Habsburg politics and neo-grammarian philology has, in time, been given the status of scientific truth backed by ruling European powers which supported the established order. The mainstream linguistics just followed suit, giving "scientific" credence to the ideology of serbocroatism. This is described in German linguist Auburger's book on Croatian language and Serbocroatism, http://openlibrary.org/books/OL3615122M/kroatische_Sprache_und_der_Serbokroatismus Mir Harven (talk) 16:03, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

The only part of your extraordinarily prolific but unfortunately vacuous verbiage of answer relevant to my question is: mainly as an effort of Austrian geopolitics - which is I'm afraid simply nonsense. Austria had absolutely no geopolitical clout in the 19th century whatsoever, esp. not on Russian, British and American linguists who studied Serbo-Crotian first-hand. It was soon-to-be-dismantled abomination of a state. German-, English- and Russian-speaking Slavists of the period where more than conversant with Serbo-Croatian to see through any distorted picture of reality. They wrote their books on the basis of literature and speech that they studied personally (lots of which is available on the Internet Archive). Same goes for other European Slavists. The ludicrous conspiracy theory that you're alleging is the most bizarre type of reality deconstruction I've seen in my life. As if there is some kind of a "lie" transcending epochs, empires, world wars, from feudalism along communism to democracies, from monarchies to totalitarian states, all part of a "Greater Serbian" agenda that has been insidiously creeping under the deceitful visage of statism. Truly remarkable. Have a cookie with a HDZ logo on it. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 19:17, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

b) Croatian language was severely stifled in description & prescription. One can simply compare the number of Croatian grammars, dictionaries and language studies in the 19th century and those up to the collapse of Yugoslavia. Reprints of older Croatian grammars and dictionaries (16th to 18th centuries) have begun to appear simultaneously with the weakening of the Communist regime grip, which can be easily detected by checking the date of reprints: http://www.hrvatskiplus.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=338:markovic-gramatike&catid=41:bibliografije&Itemid=48, http://www.hrvatskiplus.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=340:markovic-rjecnici&catid=41:bibliografije&Itemid=48

All of which, if adequately referenced, could be added to the article. But it has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not Croatian is a variant of Serbo-Croatian, which it clearly is despite whatever insane politicking or oppression may have occurred.

Imagine if the Germans had won WWII, and imposed the German language on the UK, with the argument that English was just a dialect of German. There would now be English nationalists insisting that English is not a Germanic language, but a Romance language contaminated with German loan words that should be "purified". But no matter what atrocities the Nazis perpetrated in their occupation of Britain, and no matter how much people may want to believe otherwise, the fact would remain that English is a Germanic language, and that's what WP would need to say. — kwami (talk) 19:49, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

No. You're just rehashing the old notion that pre-1990s foreign linguists (let's take just them) are somehow "scientifically" motivated & Croatian linguists (from whom they've learnt- mainly) what they do know about Croatian language are, so to speak, "linguistic nationalists" (the implied statement). The fact, without further elaboration is as follows:

1. English-speaking Croatists (and Serbo-Croatists, whatever this may mean; also, Slavicists with this particular interest) learnt the craft- whatever degree- from Croatian linguists and their textbooks. Their process of learning (Magner's, Hawksworth's, Auty's, Brown's,..) hadn't happen in a vacuum. They started from Yugo-integralist ideology of Serbocroatism as a given & tried to accomodate the learnt facts to the ideology. Actually, they, after the collapse of Yugoslavia & Serbocroatist paradigm have shown the least interest to re-examine their discredited concepts and virtually no innovative ideas ("soul searching") other, more involved Slavicists and Croatists, have offered: the already mentioned Barbara Oczkowa: (Croats and their language);http://www.akademicka.pl/cgi-local/start.pl?kom=pokaz&isbn=83-89425-30-0&uid=0 http://www.hrvatskiplus.org/prilozi/dokumenti/anagram/Sesar_Oczkowa.pdf; Artur Bagdasarov: (Croatian literary langauge in the 2nd half of the 19th century):http://www.amazon.com/Khorvatskii-literaturnyi-poloviny-uchebnoe-posobie/dp/5747403060/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1274139279&sr=1-3-fkmr1; Georg Holzer: Historische Grammatik des Kroatischen: http://d-nb.info/gnd/132942607; Werner Lehfeldt: Morphologie des Kroatischen: http://www.daniel.buncic.de/krmorph.htm,..

2. the position of English-speaking Serbo-Croatists needs a further elaboration.

• Be as it may, one can easily draw the following conclusions:

1. regional and global institutions, as well as linguists, simply didn't know what to do with the post-1990 situation. It boiled down to: they thought that they had learned one language, a standard Serbo-Croatian. And now, all these Croatian linguists from whom they have acquired the knowledge of a small South Slavic language, are virtually unanimous in their explicit admission that Croatian language is the only true and individual language, while "SC" was a socio-political term covering, for reasons previously mentioned, two standard languages & a variety of dialects. Experts on the field, writers of dictionaries and grammars, linguistic studies, inventors of language-acquiring methods, mathematical linguists and classical philologists- all were claiming basically two things: a) Croatian and Serbian are two closely related languages; b) they are not one (policentric, pluricentric) language, nor have they ever been. Virtually all of them: Petar Guberina, Rudolf Filipović, Dalibor Brozović, Radoslav Katičić, Stjepan Babić, Marko Samardžija, Alemko Gluhak, Milica Mihaljević, Branka Tafra, Stjepan Damjanović, Ranko Matasović, Josip Silić, Ivo Pranjković, Dragica Malić, Dragutin Raguž, Marko Tadić, ... They- Croatian linguists- have, in time, did a nice job of analysing & presenting their native tongue: http://jthj.ffzg.hr/default_english.htm So- what's wrong ? Where did this SC they (Kenneth Naylor, Wayles Browne, Gerhard Newelkowsky,..) learned- actually "go" ?

2. the "foreign" (foreign to the imagined SC) linguists had to face hard facts.

a) Croatian language production was, from 1990s (and 1980s, but after the collapse of Communism & Yugoslavia) unanimous in re their language name. The following are representative examples:

http://www.globus.hr:8080/bookshop/Book.htm?sp=1024 (Babić, Brozović et al- Croatian phonetics, phonology and morphology, 597 p.)

http://www.globus.hr:8080/bookshop/Book.htm?sp=264 (Babić- Croatian word-formation (wider than morphology), 618 p)

http://www.globus.hr:8080/bookshop/Book.htm?sp=445 (Katičić- Croatian Syntax, 536 p)

http://www.globus.hr:8080/bookshop/Book.htm?sp=903 (Matešić et al.- German-Croatian Universal Dictionary, 2076 p)

http://www.globus.hr:8080/bookshop/Book.htm?sp=262 (Bujas- English-Croatian Dictionary, 1528 p)

http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=58094 (Barić et al- Croatian grammar, 683 p)

http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=58240 (IHJJ- Croatian language cousellor, 1659 p)

http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=64911 (Šonje et al- Croatian dictionary, 1450 p)

http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=67468 (Anić- Croatian dictionary, 1881 p)

http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=72486 (Silić & Pranjković- Croatian grammar for high schools, 424 p)

http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=74967 (Matasović- Comparative-historical grammar of Croatian language, 362 p)

http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=58211 (Gluhak- Croatian Etymological dictionary, 832 p)

As far as I know, virtually only Croatian linguist who has used the term "Serbo-Croatian" is young ex-pat Snježana Kordić in her Serbo-Croatian and SerboKroatisch books: http://www.snjezana-kordic.de/snjezana_kordic.htm

b) Serbian language linguistic production was also voluminous, and also under- with one significant exception- under Serbian name. I'll put just a few titles:

http://www.knjizara.com/pls/sasa/knjizara.knjiga?k_id=116462 (Klajn- Serbian grammar for foreigners, 282 p)

http://www.knjizara.com/pls/sasa/knjizara.knjiga?k_id=19936 (Klajn- Serbian Word formation 1, 372 p)

http://www.knjizara.com/pls/sasa/knjizara.knjiga?k_id=110184 (Piper at al- Serbian syntax, 1165 p)

http://www.knjizara.com/pls/sasa/knjizara.knjiga?k_id=21527 (Simić et al- Serbian Syntax, 1424 p)

http://www.knjizara.com/pls/sasa/knjizara.knjiga?k_id=92343 (Loma et al- Serbian Etymological dictionary, pt. 1.)

http://www.knjizara.com/pls/sasa/knjizara.knjiga?k_id=120187 (Vujanić et al- Serbian dictionary, 1561 p)

Virtually the only significant exception is "Rečnik SANU", Serbo-Croatian dictionary of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts- a project begun in 1950s and still being issued - tome 17. appeared in 2006.: http://www.knjizara.com/pls/sasa/knjizara.knjiga?k_id=118519 before dissatisfied & confused Serbian public)

So, what do we have up against this ?

We have a cited example of few English language textbooks on Croatian or Serbian or a medley of both languages (add a Bosnian, too). Let's see. These are elementary grammar textbooks & cannot serve the purpose of proving or disproving the status of Croatian as a standard language. In fact, they actually deprive the SC-or BSC- of this status by the very content of its material and presentation. What I've said, and what is amply illustrated in the list of voluminous dictionaries, grammars, syntaxes, specialised dictionaries, ... of Croatian and Serbian languages cited above: the "core" or basic grammar or typology of standard languages is the same. But- these languages' identities are not reducible to the linguistic typology of standard languages. I- or eminent Croatian linguists, whom I've read- do not deny that typologically-structurally BCSM have virtually the same basic grammar of standard languages. The point is that they differ, significantly, in other areas that are more vital for language identity than elementary textbook grammar, or as Dalibor Brozović had said- invoking a sort of Marxist metaphor- the base (essential grammar) is the same, but the superstructure (accentuation, word-formation, higher syntax, stylistics, greater part of the lexicon, especially scientific and technical terminology, phraseology,..) is different. The approach of the mentioned linguists (Wayles Browne, Ronelle Alexander,..) is a reductionist one- as if a human body anatomy and physiology would be reduced to the skeleton, dismissing endocrine, vascular, nervous,..systems. These BCSM languages, save the basic grammar, differ in other areas, from word formation to terminology, higher syntax and stylistics, which can be used in any normal human situation. As they speak, the speakers are clearly identified as being either X or Y; the same with written text, whether literary or scientific (mathematics, medicine, physics, psychology, linguistics,..). I'd sum the differences of the quoted linguists (Browne, Alexander, Greenberg,..) approach & position vis-a-vis mine (and mainly Croatian, Russian, German and Polish linguists - Oczkowa, Auburger, Bagdasarov, Rapacka, Vasiljeva, Newelkowsky,..): a) typologically-structurally BCSM is one "entity". One claim (Browne, Alexander,..) is that this entity, a "squeezed out" basic grammar, is a "language". I aver (and Bagdasarov, Auburger,..) that this is not a language, but an abstract entity common to the aforementioned languages, and that no text or speech can be written or spoken in this entity, without being written either as Croatian or Bosnian or Serbian. In short: this reductionist approach has stripped the notion of human language of any realistic content. What is an abstract umbrella covering true individual languages, here is presented as a true individual language. And, this is false. Language is not a basic grammar, neither for classification purposes only.

Here are these few instances of use of SC (or something similar) term:

• Rick Derksen (btw- interesting: Štambuk's edit) book Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon. First: there are different Croatian and Serbian etymological dictionaries, both in the making, to disentangle the puzzle of Skok's "Etymological Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian" (Croatian out-of-print: http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=58211; Croatian project-http://www.ihjj.hr/index_en.html#etrjecnik ; Serbian project- http://www.planeta.rs/10/etimoloski.htm ). So, here is work on two separate etymological dictionaries. But, now we come to the differentiating points: Derksen has used the term SC -perhaps- because it's a leftover from a previous era; but, structurally, it's dated because one can find in Croatian etymological dictionary Čakavian and Kajkavian words (ignored by Petar Skok's Štokavian purism in his magnum opus)- that's why Vojmir Vinja's "Supplement's of Adriatic Etymologies to Skok's dictionary"; http://www.profil.hr/knjiga/jadranske-etimologije-knjiga-1-ah/10705/ has had to appear, to counterbalance Skok's Štokavian purism which has partly falsified Croatian language history, as presented in his otherwise valuable work. Also, a 10.000 entries dictionary cannot be something that will "decide" on the status of these languages. The very name used in Dirksen's survey attests that this name (SC) is still sometimes used by some linguists. So what ? Neither by the majority, nor with reference to the etymological work of Croatian (and Serbian) linguists.

This is confusing a SC standard, which arguably is extinct, with SC as a branch of Slavic. Have S and C been reclassified to be equidistant from each other and other SS languages like Slovene? If not, then there's a node that includes S and C but not Slovene. The name of that node in English is SC. Period. All the politicking is utterly irrelevant. The ELL lumps the languages together for discussion, though under a more politically acceptable name. The US State Dept. teaches a single SC language. Etc etc etc. Whatever Croats feel about the translation of the term in Croatian is irrelevant to what we do in English. If you can argue that BCS is a more common term than SC, then we can shift to calling it BCS. But the node doesn't disappear just because we argue about the name for that node. That would be like saying we should delete all references to "Slavic" because I think it should be called "Slavonic".

As for dictionaries, so what? We have Canadian dictionaries. Does that mean that there is no such language as "English"? — kwami (talk) 17:46, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian language has been completely etymologized and these newer etymological dictionaries are simply trimmed-down versions of old ones, taking into account newer scholarship on Proto-Slavic, Balto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-European. Skok's dictionary primarily targeted literary Serbo-Croatian language, and did not "ignore" Čakavian and Kajkavian as a part of some "anti-Croatian plot"; it neglected them simply because it was out of the scope of the entire project (which was enormous in scope, eventually published posthumously after much editing). It contains lots of dialectal words, and regionalisms from all over the Croatia which are not part of the standard Croatian today. The new Croatian etymological dictionary that Matasović is writing also only contains the literary dialect (Neoštokavian). One can write separate etymological dictionaries of "Croatian" and "Serbian", but what exactly is the point if they'll be etymologizing the same words in the same manner? If one is writing comparative etymological dictionary of all Slavic languages, there is little point in separating B/C/S. This is how Derksen in his dictionary mentions his usage of the term Serbo-Croatian (from page 19):

The name “Serbo-Croatian” will occasionally be used as a generic designation for all varieties of the language spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Montenegro. The abbreviation “SCr.”, however, refers in principle to neo-Štokavian, i.e. to those Štokavian dialects that underwent the neo-Štokavian retraction of the stress. A prominent example is the language that was codified by Vuk Karadžić and Đžuro Daničić in the 19th century and subsequently became the basis of normative grammars and dictionaries, for instance the Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (RJA). The Serbo-Croatian (neo-Štokavian) forms presented in this dictionary usually conform to aforementioned normative tradition. In some cases I have quoted directly from Vuk Karadžić’s dictionary (abbreviated as “Vuk”).

The Čakavian dialects of Serbo-Croatian are mainly represented by Jurišić’s description of the Vrgada (Vrg.) dialect (1966-1973), Kalsbeek’s description of the dialect of Orbanići (Orb.) near Žminj (1998) and Belić’s description of the dialect of Novi (1909), which is the best-known description of a Čakavian dialect. In addition, I have occasionally added data from Hvar (Hraste 1937), Cres (Tentor 1909, 1950), and Orlec (Houtzagers 1985). The Kajkavian dialects are respresented by Jedvaj’s description of the Bednja dialect.

So in essence - this has nothing to do with politicking, and the the term Serbo-Croatian is still abundantly used in a strict linguistic sense: the same shared core of the three modern-day national standards, as well as the all-encompassing meaning of all the speeches (govori) spoken on the area, which have converged and have been mixed throughout the ages. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 20:08, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

• the very name of mentioned textbooks testifies about confusion. For instance, Magner's Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language (where is SC ?) or, even more, Alexander's |Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a grammar: with sociolinguistic commentary, pose some questions:

a) which, on earth, is the name of this "language" they suppose to teach ? Croatian and Serbian ? Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian ? Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian ? Serbo- Croatian ? Croato- Serbian ? Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and/or Montenegrin ? When is this farce going to end ?

b) on closer examination, one of these textbooks is very helpful, Ronelle Alexander's. Big chunks of it can be read on googlebooks page, http://books.google.com/books?id=uPxtwiVi6YsC&dq=Alexander+Bosnian+Croatian&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=r-v2S-yKBIWRONXJiZUM&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false And it is evident that it teaches three languages in one book. Every single page is studded with B, C, S notation for scores of words, phrases, syntactic structures (ie. "where" anything mentioned belongs to). It is a correct, fair (in attribution of words, sentences etc.)- and utterly clumsy way of teaching. On could construct similar textbooks for similar languages (say, Bulgarian and Macedonian, Hindi and Urdu, Norwegian and Danish,..)

c) with all due respect, linguists like Frederik Kortland and Wayles Browne, as well as language naming at IWoBA conference are hardly relevant. Orthoepy (still not satisfactorily resolved in standard Croatian) is not central to the description of Croatian, and language naming in works on such a wide field as Balto-Slavic accentuation is peripheral- these linguists have not contributed to the understanding of Croatian language beyond the textbook framework. They simply didn't do this, it's not their field & OK. And they cannot serve as reference point re the Croatian.

So where are we left with arguments for "Serbo-Croatian" umbrella term ?

Three elementary language textbooks, which have three different names for languages they purport to teach: Serbo-Croatian, Croatian and Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian. The first one is minimally refurbished textbook from 1950s, a leftover of Yugo language policy and its adherents. The best among the textbooks, Alexander's, exemplifies, by its content and presentation, clearly that what's inside is well beyond "variations" of a language. This, plus a few references in linguistic journals and conferences.

On the other hand, virtually all modern linguistic literature (syntax, grammar, dictionaries both monolingual and bilingual), describing these languages does not use any of these terms- Serbo-Croatian, BCS, HBS, BCSM,... Because, finally freed from political pressures, grammarians and lexicographers can write normal language studies and works without resorting to clumsy & confusing two columns criss-cross references which leave a reader confounded on all levels, from accentuation to semantics. In-depth studies & works, not just the textbook level. Plus, true foreign experts on Croatian (already mentioned). Plus numerous "single name" learning tools for this elementary level: Norris & Ribnikar [http://www.amazon.com/Yourself-Croatian-Complete-Course-Audiopack/dp/0071418806/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274476730&sr=8-1], Berlitz [http://www.amazon.com/Berlitz-Croatian-Phrase-Speaking-Language/dp/9812681876/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274476730&sr=8-2], .. Plus waning of "SC" term in other institutions, such as the US Congress Library, http://www.loc.gov/index.html - it's easy to type in the search window Croatian language, Serbo-Croatian language, Serbian language and check the results.

In short, this entire little affair is a grotesque. Like one should "prove" that one's language is a language and not a variant of a language. Utterly bizarre. As a Croatian linguist of younger generation Mato Kapović has remarked (http://www.matica.hr/kolo/kolo2009_1.nsf/AllWebDocs/Polozaj_hrvatskoga_jezika_u_svijetu_danas ): "Ako nam je stalo do toga da i stranci naš jezik zovu hrvatski, jedino je razumno rješenje pisati nove priručnike (gramatike, rječnike, monografije, članke...) koji će nositi hrvatsko (a ne srpskohrvatsko) ime – ne samo na hrvatskom, nego i na stranim jezicima. To dakako nije lako (kako primjerice napisati novi Akademijin rječnik?), ali je to jedini pravi put, s obzirom na to da u takvim slučajevima kukanje i plakanje malo pomažu. Posve je jasno i zašto je to pravi način. Jednostavno zato što će se malo tko usuditi, citirajući nešto iz knjige koja ima samo hrvatski u naslovu, citirati to kao srpskohrvatski. Ne samo zato što je to na neki način krivotvorenje podataka, nego i zato što malo tko od stranih stručnjaka može biti siguran da je primjerice neka sintaktička začkoljica, objavljena u kakvu opisu hrvatskoga jezika, doista tipična i za srpski jezik. Stoga je u takvim slučajevima najlakše i najsigurnije uvijek citirati jezik po tome kako je on nazvan na koricama same knjige, tj. rada. ". Let some of the participants of the discussion translate this passage, so that those who would like to arbitrate on this language position could comprehend what's been said. Mir Harven (talk) 21:42, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

A quote from the abovelinked article by Mate Kapović: Dijalekatski gledano, hrvatski su i srpski nedvojbeno jedan jezik. "From a dialectal viewpoint, Croatian and Serbian are doubtlessly one language". Sapienti sat. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 20:10, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

Croatian linguist, member of Croatian Academy of Sciences (and five more European Academies of Sciences), worldwide eminent Slavist, Radoslav Katičić told for Mate Kapović that Kapović's attitudes are unacceptable and that he wouldn't like to discuss with such persons (Oprostite, s takvima ne bih htio raspravljati. To što on zastupa je neprihvatljivo). (Vijenac magazine, nr. 427-429, 15 July 2010, p. 5). Vijenac is the magazine of Matica hrvatska, Croatian top cultural institution.
Dialectally "one language"? Come on. Čakavian, Kajkavian, Western Newštokavian, Slavonic Oldštokavian, Dubrovnik's dialect as dialects of Serbian? Yeah, wright, so does cows fly. Kad na hrastu naranče narastu. Kubura (talk) 03:42, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

No-one said that, as you well know. — kwami (talk) 04:53, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Standard Croatian is the product of over nine hundred years of literature ...

I removed this paragraph:

Standard Croatian is the product of over nine hundred years of literature written in a mixture of Croatian Church Slavonic and the vernacular language. Croatian Church Slavonic was abandoned by the mid-15th century, and Croatian as embodied in a purely vernacular literature has existed for more than five centuries. (See Croatian literature.)

I'm sorry but this is simply nonsense. Church Slavonic as used until the 15th-16th century (and later on isolated areas) has absolutely nothing do with modern standard Croatian which is based on Neoštokavian dialect. Modern speakers can't understand a word of it. And neither does it have with vernacular literature "that has existed for more than five centuries", because such vernacular literature was mostly based on non-standard dialects (Kajkavian, Čakavian). In terms of grammar and lexis, contributions to modern standard Croatian are in both cases absolutely none. Modern standard Croatian is a direct continuation of "Western Serbo-Croatian", i.e. literary Neštokavian as standardized in the beginning-mid 19th century by Vuk Karadžić and his Croatian colleagues. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:32, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I reverted your edit. --Ex13 (talk) 18:43, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

What Ivan wrote has also been my understanding. Sorry, but if you're going to restore challenged material, you're at the least going to need to come up with some convincing sources.

This has long since become a biased exposition of fancies about the Croatian language, so I'll just add- w/out further explanation- a remark: contemporary English is much more "removed" from Old English, than is Croatian from the mixture of Church Slavic and Croatian vernacular. So there is a project "Rječnik starohrvatskoga jezika"/A Dictionary of Old-Croatian Language, covering the period from 11th to, roughly, 1500: http://www.ihjj.hr/projekt_sr.html .Or, http://infoz.ffzg.hr/INFuture/2007/pdf/2-11%20Kapetanovic,%20Amir,%20Digitalizacija%20korpusa%20starohrvatskih%20tekstova%20i%20kritika%20teksta.pdf "Summary. Digitalization of Old Croatian texts was initiated within the framework of the project “The Old Croatian Dictionary”. The purpose of the initiative was to make a dictionary that would lexicographically describe the lexis of the oldest periods of Croatian literacy in the Croatian language (from first records to the end of the 15th century). Digitalization of Old Croatian texts is more complex than digitalization of contemporary texts, not only owing to predominantly non-authored corpus in manuscript form, but also owing to the fact that the collected Old-Čakavian / Old-Štokavian corpus, originally written in three scripts,first needs to be critically analyzed. The Croatian medieval texts have been published since the 19th century in different forms (photograph, transcript,transliteration, transcription), and the publications have varying degree of quality. In addition, some texts that may become integral parts of the corpus have not been published yet. The paper will present the corpus structure, and major issues and principles in corpus analysis and design.Key words: digitalization, corpus, the Old-Croatian language, Middle Ages, lexicography, textual criticism" I'll revert to the previous form since the change is based on false premises orf serbocroatism. Mir Harven (talk) 12:19, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

What you cite above has absolutely nothing to do with the statements in the paragraph I removed. The paragraph stated that modern Croatian standard is based on Church Slavonic and 9-century-old "vernacular literature", which is simply utter rubbish. That "Old Croatian" of CS and Old Čakavian has nothing to do with modern Croatian standard, which is Ijekavian Neoštokavian. It does't contribute to it grammatically or lexically. Not a single word. Old Čakvian works such as Judita or Ribanje i ribarsko prigovaranje, which are on mandatory high-school reading list in "Croatian language", are almost completely intelligible to the poor 15- and 16-year old, without those copious 40-page dictionaries of "old words" at their end. And are moreover usually read in "modernized" version [6] " Usporedo tekst izvornika i prijevod na suvremeni hrvatski jezik" - "parallel setoriginal and the translation to modern Croatian". If it was "the same language" with minor differences, as Sulejman preposterously claimes above, or a "pre-form of the modern standard", which the contentious paragraph asserts, there wouldn't be need for a "translation" would there? This "Old Croatian" that IHJJ is compiling dictionay of has absolutely nothing to do with modern Croatian standard. Its relation is comparatively the same as that of Slavoserbian to modern Serbian - obsolete literary language, unused for centuries. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:16, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

As usual, your writing is just a rehashing of old Slavic philology from the early 19th century. First- neoštokavian-ijekavian as the "basis" of Croatian is long since dismissed; as I said, it's stylized around it, not based. Second- Croatian word formation is heavily influenced by Church Slavic, even in the 20th century, since it prefers norm for nouns with suffix -telj over those with suffix- lac, which is a Štokavian norm (čitatelj/čitalac; nositelj/nosilac; prevoditelj/prevodilac).Other morphological and syntactical features of Church Slavic are prominent in contemporary Croatian, while they are completely absent from neoštokavian-ijekavian dialects (for instance, wide use of participles & Gerund). Third- Čakavian is completely comprehensive to the modern Croatian readers, which can be attested by oldest Čakavian texts, like the one from Šibenik cca. 1300- http://hr.wikisource.org/wiki/%C5%A0ibenska_molitva The point of intelligibillity has nothing to do with dialects, but with loan-words. Čakavian from 1500s with relatively few loan-words is much more comprehensible to the speaker of standard Croatian, then are the texts Štokavian texts saturated with foreign words that did not enter in standard vocabulary. Hanibal Lucić's Čakavian texts, http://hr.wikisource.org/wiki/Hanibal_Luci%C4%87, are much more intelligible than štokavian-ijekavian of Bosnian Muslim Muhamed Hevaju Uskufi, ca. 100 ys his junior: http://www.xs4all.nl/~eteia/kitabhana/Hevaji_Uskufi_Muhamed/Savjet_zhenama.html Therefore, revert, since your obsession with Štokavian dialect & neo-grammarian dated approach has only contributed to the falsification of Croatian language, both diachronically and synchronically.Mir Harven (talk) 12:37, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

The ELL2 says that SC lit dates back to the 11th century, when it's written on stone in Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Separate Croatian lexicography was not established until the 19th; there never has been a separate Croatian orthography. When is a distinction between Croatian and Serbian first documented? — kwami (talk) 19:33, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

There was no need for such questions, since Serbian and Croatian came into contact for the 1st time during the 2nd half of the 18th century & and the 1st half of the 19th century. Modern Serbian linguistics have done a pretty good job in tracing the changes of Serbian language (if you don't understand, find someone to translate it:http://www.politika.rs/rubrike/Kultura/Rechnik-koji-niko-nema.lt.html Mir Harven (talk) 12:12, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

And when and where was that they "came into contact" ? In the 18th century Croatian and Serbian literature was virtually non-existent, 99.9% of the populace was illiterate, and the territories belonging to today's sovereigns belonged to some half-a-dozen empires of the period. Until the mid-19th century, the official language in "Croatia" was Latin. No more lies, please. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:03, 3 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but- are you mentally fit for this discussion ? You say that Serbian and Croatian literatures were virtually non-existent in the 18th century ? Croatian_literature. And you write "Croatia", as if did not exist ? Are those who support your claims aware of what you've written ? Mir Harven (talk) 12:41, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

You restored with the 'citation needed' tags deleted, so I reverted you. Deleting tags for questioned material has been considered vandalism; it's certainly not encyclopedic.

I'm reviewing the Croat Lit article. It doesn't say anything that would contradict Ivan. It covers Croatia as a geographic area, not the literature of the Croatian language. Perhaps the article is simply unclear?: medieval lit was in Latin and OCS; then it talks about Dalmatian lit; then Ribanje i ribarsko prigovaranje has been translated into Croatian, suggesting that it was not in Croatian; then the article is quite vague until Gaj. Was the earlier post-Dalmatian lit perhaps in Chakavian, and therefore unintelligible with modern Croatian until Gaj switched the standard to Shtokavian on the Serb model? I can't tell from the article you referred us to.

It says, "during the 17th century, when Dubrovnik became the literary center of the Croatian language". But AFAIK the language of Dubrovnik at the time was Dalmatian, not Croatian. What we need are refs of the point from which the vernacular lit uses dialects currently considered Croatian: Kajkavian, Chakavian, Shtokavian. Dalmatian, Latin, and OCS don't count.

One thing I'd object to, is that the connection between "Standard Croatian" (which dates from Gaj, correct?) and "900 years" seems completely arbitrary. Why not date it from the first Greek or Phoenician settlements on the Dalmatian coast, if we're dating from the introduction of literacy in the area? Or when the first Classical lit was read in the area? Why not date it from Sumerian, or Gilgamesh, and the invention of literacy, which Croatian is an heir to? Why is this date the one chosen for the beginnings of Croat lit?

IMO, the only objective date for the Croatian language (which after all is what this article is about) would be the first attestation of literature in the Croatian language, not some other language. And for Standard Croatian, it would be the first attestation of lit in Standard Croatian. Of course, we should mention where that influence came from (Latin, OCS, and Dalmatian?), but at that point we merely link to the relevant articles for the reader who wants to follow up those leads. — kwami (talk) 18:15, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't think you even know what you're talking about. The name of the language is not the central point- Croatian literature had been written in "Illyrian" up until 1860s (http://www.hercegbosna.org/STARO/ostalo/jezik2.html ). As has been pointed out earlier- you simply don't know elementary things. "Standard Croatian" ? What are you talking about ? Beowulf was written in Old-English (not standard English we use now), and no rational person would question the existence of English language and literature in 1100s. As for standard Croatian, there is a consensus among Croatian linguists that it had not begun with Gaj, but somewhere between 1500 and 1700- language periodisation, be it English, Turkish, Persian, Czech, French or Croatian, is always a tricky issue. As is the case with Slovene, which wasn't called-primarily- "Slovene", nor was it standardized orthographically- which doesn't preclude Slovenes from attributing the beginning of Slovenian language and culture with Primož Trubar. Adding one link of older dictionaries, which are just another nail in the coffin of the serbocroatist ideology, http://crodip.ffzg.hr/default_e.aspx I'll revert & do away with superfluous and inaccurate SC label. Mir Harven (talk) 18:48, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Mir Harven you're writing nonsense and spreading lies. So called "standard Croatian" was invented less than 20 years ago, there was no "Croatian language" for centuries before that. People and literate writers used general-purpose designations such as "Slav", "Illyrian" etc. In the period 1500-1700 there was no such thing as "Croatian language", nor there was "Croatia" in any form similar to that of today. There were no "Croatian grammars", "Croatian dictionaries"....people used their local vernacular dialects as literary tongues. Standardization only started with Vuk Karadžić and his close friend Ludwig Gay who made Ijekavian Neoštokavian (at that time spoken by a small minority of Croats) standard Serbo-Croatian literary language. See Vienna Literary Agreement. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 19:09, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

I sincerely think you'll have to seek a help. Because your statements are in such a discrepancy with reality than one is left doubting what really is going on ? I'll just give a few university textbooks on Croatian language and literature (they all begin somewhere in 1000s):

• Hrvatska književnost do narodnog preporoda/Croatian literature up until Illyrian Revival, http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=58112

• Povijest hrvatske književnosti 1, od početka do Krbavske bitke 1493./A history of Croatian literature, from the beginning to the 1493., http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=63705

• Povijest hrvatske književnosti 2., od humanističkih početaka-1604/A history of Croatian literature, from humanist beginnings to 1604., http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=63706

• Povijest hrvatske književnosti 3, od Gundulićeva "Poroda od tmine" do Kačićeva "Razgovora ugodnog"/A history of Croatian literature, from Ivan Gundulić to Andrija Kačić Miošić, http://www.sveznadar.com/knjiga.aspx?knjiga=63707

Actually, your claims- as I interpret them- are that Croatian language did not exist until 1850s & then suddenly appeared, out of thin air ? My, my,....

So- these lists of Croatian grammars (Zagreb school of Slavonic studies): http://www.hrvatskiplus.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=338:markovic-gramatike&catid=41:bibliografije&Itemid=75,

and Croatian dictionaries: http://www.hrvatskiplus.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=340:markovic-rjecnici&catid=41:bibliografije&Itemid=48 are- false ? Since, until 1850s: no Croatian language, no Croatian literature ? Interesting. Revert. 18:27, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Look at the names of those dictionaries: it's always "Slavic" or "Illyrian" or "Dalmatian"...It's as much "Croatian" as it's "Serbian" or "Bosnian". And those old works - interestingly most of them have no ethnic self-designation at all. This has lead to many fierce disputes about ethnic classification of prominent old writers (such as Gundulić), who don't call their language neither "Croatian" nor "Serbian", and were thus called either "Croatian" or "Serbian" depending on who wrote the history books. Same with those "Histories of Croatian literatures" that you link above - written by nationalists from a skewed nationalist perspective. They do not necessarily present the real state of affairs. Croatian and Serbian national consciousness roughly corresponds with the establishment of Serbo-Croatian literary language - not without a reason! --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 22:17, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

This is nonsense, and the author of the post knows it. 1) even "inert" points of reference,such as Britannica, do not deny the existence of Croatian and Serbian literatures: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/143624/Croatian-literature & http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/535385/Serbian-literature 2) the name of the language is not essential- contemporary Croatian could be called Illyrian as well. So Italian was frequently called Tuscan, Farsi Iranian, Persian and whatnot, Slovene Carinthian,..Russia Muscovy, Byzantine Greeks Romans, Poles Lithuanians etc etc What is essential is that: a) these grammars and dictionaries belong to the Croatian, and only Croatian lexicography and grammaticology- and not Bosniak or Serbian, which don't consider grammars and dictionaries of Kašić, Della Bella, Belostenec, Mikalja, Habdelić, Lanosović, Reljković, Stulli,... to be part of their own cultural and philological tradition. b) Moreover, these works perfectly exemplify uniquely Croatian mixture of dialects, since (mainly) Štokavian dictionaries like Mikalja's and Kašić's contain numerous Čakavian entries, and mainly Kajkavian works like Belostenec's and Jambrešić's dictionaries contain explicitly Štokavian words and phrases. c) Slavic studies have established long since that in the field of language and letters, "Illyrian" equals "Croatian"- for instance in the work of Prague University professor Matija Murko: Die Bedeutung der Refomation.., 1927. (The Meaning of Reformation in South Slavic lands", p. 106: "Odustajem od daljnjih navoda i priloga za hrvatsko ime u 16. do 18. stoljeća, jer već dosada izneseni dovoljnim su dokazom, da se ime ilirsko, slovinsko i hrvatsko upotrebljavalo kao sinonim"/"I give up further notifications and supplements for Croatian name from 16. to 18. centuries, because heretofore given examples suffice to support the claim that the Illyrian, Slovin and Croatian names have been used synonymously" , http://www.hercegbosna.org/STARO/ostalo/jezik2.html . Also, Croatian dictionaries like Mikalja and Stulli explicitly state that "Illyrian" is "Croatian":http://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Govori_o_hrvatskom_jeziku . 4) As for "nationalists" who write Croatian literature histories from "nationalist perspective"- these are all University textbooks in circulation for cca. 70 ys, the authoritative being Kombol, Ježić, Liber edition, Frangeš,..: http://www.mvpei.hr/MVP.asp?pcpid=202 . It seems that Mr. Štambuk entertains the notion that everything Croatian is "nationalist" (in his interpretation bad, bad, bad,..). This is a mindset better suited to a Communist commissary or censor, than encyclopaedia contributor.Mir Harven (talk) 12:22, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Ludwig Gay... oh my... maybe then we need to call Vuk Karadžić Wolf Fuckerich. Ivan Štambuk you make me laugh, with all that nonsense that you spread here or on en.wiktionary (tzv. vikcionar)--Ex13 (talk) 20:27, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

What I "spread" are substantiated facts, as opposed to almost everything that the nationalist clique emits. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 06:48, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Okay, if we can move past the ad hominem attacks, here are my 2c: Old Čakavian literature can be considered the basis of Croatian lit, since Chakavian is considered a dialect of Croatian, and it's studied in Croatian schools just as Chaucer is studied in English schools. However, it's hardly the basis of the modern standard, nor does it date back 9 centuries, as that paragraph claims. So although I object to the current paragraph as being at best disingenuous, I think the topics touched upon are relevant to the article. Perhaps we can say s.t. along the following (could either be shorter or longer):

Croatian literature began with an epic poem written in Old Chakavian and modeled after Dalmatian/OCS/Latin [or whatever] lit in 1501. [Maybe mention Illyrian movement.] A Shtokavian standard shared with Serbian was established by Gaj ca. 1830. After a period of forced unification with Serbian during the Yugoslav era, a renewal of Croatian literature followed the independence of Croatia.

I'm sure I've got the details wrong, but s.t. along those lines would strike me as reasonable. — kwami (talk) 07:07, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

No. Because imaginary Čakavian -Štokavian supposed disputes reflect the dated reasoning of the early 19th century philologists (Kollar, Šafarik,..) who couldn't understand- from their national revival perspective which identified people with a language (in this case dialect)- the Croat situation where from the beginning all three dialects, variously centred, constitute Croatian literacy (Church Slavic and Čakavian in the case of Baška Tablet, Church Slavic and Štokavian, in the case of Humac tablet), and literature- mainly Čakavian "Judita" authored by Marko Marulić in 1501., and mainly Štokavian Džore Držić and Šiško Menčetić in 1480-1500. Štokavian intransigence is the result of an obsolete philology & diehard Yugoslav serbocroatism. Mir Harven (talk) 18:43, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Does that mean you agree with me, or disagree with me? — kwami (talk) 22:13, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

About what ? For existence of a national literature, it's irrelevant which dialects some of its part have been written in (cf. ancient Greek and Ionic, Aeolic etc. dialects- Sappho, who wrote in Aeolic, is not less Greek writer because her native dialect didn't succeed to become the basis of Greek koine. All this Čakavian- Štokavian etc. stuff is simply a hangover from the 19th century Slavic philology and useless. Mir Harven (talk) 12:30, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

However, language≠literature. To reduct your thesis ad absurdum, there exist a vast body of literature by ethnic Croatian (chiefly coastal) authors written in Venetian, Latin and Italian. Do you want to claim that those are also Croatian dialects? Do you want to claim that Croatian belongs to Romance languages family on that point?
The fact is, modern Croatian has approximately zero (0, nada, zilch) traces of Chakavian and Kajkavian morphology, vocabulary and grammar -- things that usually constitute the common understanding of a language. You may deny a hundred times that standard modern Croatian is much closer to standard modern Serbian than to any selected flavor of Chakavian and Kajkavian, but that cannot disprove the fact that it is. And it is not our fault that we selected not to close the eyes to that fact, like you did... (for apparently political reasons).
No one here is denying that Chakavian and Kajkavian are Croatian dialects, and that the literature written in those dialects belongs to Croatian cultural heritage. But those dialects did not become the standard and, as in many modern societies, are subjected to gradual fading and marginalization. If one of them had became a standard, we would probably not discuss these issues here, but the dialect that prevailed was basically the same that is the basis for modern Serbian.
To be fair, I support the inclusion of a reference to Chakavian and Kajkavian literature in the lead section, but not in the current wording ("Standard Croatian is the product of over nine hundred years of literature written in a mixture..."), which is misleading in many ways. No such user (talk) 12:58, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Mir Harven: can we simply agree that modern-day, standard literary Croatian language of the 21st century has basically no Čakavian and Kajkavian components?

In that light, can we also agree that it's a bit misleading to state that the modern-day standard draws on literary traditions of dialects that do not make up a significant part of it?

Sure that they were literary traditions of the past...in various scripts and dialects and traditions, but they're gradually gone extinct, and the inception of literary Serbo-Croatian in the early 19th century was pretty abrupt, from both Croatian and Serbian perspective! --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 22:12, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

No. If you personly can not read or understand old croatian literary that is your personal issue. Most of Croatians can. Do you realy want to arrgue that Kašić's gramar has nothing to do with today's Croatian?

Also, I do not see why do you repeatedly comparing standard Croatian with standard Serbian. Those two are seperated standards (as Norwegian is to Danish or Swedish, or Portuguese to Spanish, or Czekh to Slovakian or Ukrainian and Bielorussian to Russian, or Dutch is to German). Croatian language is consisted of 3 sets of dialects, kajkavian (Quaquauian, Caicawian, Kaikavian), čakavian (Chakavian, Tshakavian, Chacawian, Chaquawian) and štokavian (Shtokavian, Stocawian) which's developed from šćakavian(Shchakawian) .

So basicaly we have western dialects Caicawian and Chakawian where some parts of Chakawian/Tshakawian in middle ages developed in Shtokawian.

So basicly formula for croatian dialects is Caicawian,Chakawian and Shtokawian(which comes from Shchtakawian).

I intentionaly used english phonetics to underline similarities between Croatian dialects. As for Serbian (or Bosnian or montenegrin), they have their's standard and we must respect that, no?

Also, other two Croatian dialects Chakawian (which is spoken in Istria, islands and seaside/Western and Southern Croatia) and Caicawian(which is spoken in Central and Northern Croatia) also gave a lot of words to standard Croatian dictionary (Croatian words are not only from Eastern herzegowian Shtokawian dialect).

If Luxemburgish is an admited language why is so hard to you to comprehend that Croatian is one (with it's one grammar, phonology and dictionary) ? Čeha (razgovor) 13:34, 16 June 2010 (UTC).

The difference with the other closely related standards is that they're based on different dialects of the same dialect continuum. Croat and Serb, however, are based on the same dialect. That makes them AFAIK like only Urdu and Hindi among the other languages of the world. Urdu and Hindi are a single Abstand dialect, Khariboli Hindustani, with two Ausbau language standards. Croat and Serb are likewise a single Abstand dialect, Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian, with three (four?) Ausbau language standards.

"where some parts of Chakawian/Tshakawian in middle ages developed in Shtokawian.". If that's the case, the Chakavian is also Serbian, because standard Serbian is Shtokavian. But Chakavian is never considered Serbian. So you've got two choices: either standard Croatian is not based on Chakavian, or Chakavian is a dialect of Serbian. — kwami (talk) 19:28, 16 June 2010 (UTC)

Let me see... Correct answer is NO. I'll try to explain it to you; Languages change over time, no?

Today's croatian and serbian dialects started to show it's characteristics in 12th century. In Croatian at that time existed dialects of Caicawian, Chakawian/Tshakawian and Shchakawian which became from Chakawian and developed in today's Shtokawian. That dialect (šćakavian) was/is also present in the 20th century in talks of towns of Virovitica, Hrv.Kostajnica and eastern bosnian speaches (that is probably past tense by now). Croatian Shtokawian developed from that Shchakawian.

At the time of 12th century serbian (eastern) Shtokawian was very much different from what is now. It had different words, rules etc. languages change over time.

At time of turkish wars both languages mixed new variteis of old dialects appeared. In 19th century Croats (and Serbs) took for standard dialect one border dialect (eastern Herzegovian), for Croats it was because it was close to litterature made by writters from Dubrovnik and older works, for Serbs it was perhaps a political decission as a large part of people which spoke that dialeckt considered themselves Serbs (eastern herzegovina and Banja Luka region). That standard (new shtokawian ijekavian) was never fully acepted amongs the Serbs (standard Serbian dialect is new shtokawian ekawian from Vojvodina, so called eastern variant of imaginary SC with long e as in Beeograd). Croatian standard (new shtokawian ijekavian from eastern Herzegovina/Dubrovnik) is something which has old history (developed from šćakavian/shchakawian) and different development then Serbian standard. Perhaps today (due to the long history as neighbours and living in common states) they have some percentage of common words, but that's going to change; in Croatian dictionary is shared with other dialects and possibly a gramar to (half caicawian/kajkawian dialect of Zagreb is very present in media and Futur II is frequent in every part of Croatia in informal talk in place of Futur I tense, while in Serbian future is primarly explained in construction "da"+present. Croatian and Serbian have a different language traditions and no matter for simmilarities in 20-30 years time they will probably be far from each other as Bulgarian is from Serbian, or Slovenian is from Croatian.

One more example; english word shopingholic in Croatian is Shopping-holičarka, while in Serbian is Kupoholičarka.

Capisci? :)

Čeha (razgovor) 18:17, 18 June 2010 (UTC).

"20-30 years time they will probably be far from each other as Bulgarian is from Serbian". See WP:Crystal ball. As of now, Serbian and Croatian and different literary standards of the same dialect. — kwami (talk) 19:30, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

How? Standard Croatian is based on eastern Herzegovian (Mostar's) dialect and standard Serbian is based on Šumadija-Vojvodina (Novi Sad/Beograd's) dialect. Difrent dialects, different standards... Čeha (razgovor) 16:48, 19 June 2010 (UTC).

Those two sub-dialects are both classified as the Shtokavian dialect. The terminology used in the works on Croatian dialectology that I have read define Shtokavian as a dialect whereas East Herzegov. and Šumadija-Vojvodina varieties are seen as "speeches" (govori) of said dialect. Vuurbeek (talk) 19:25, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

The English word for that is accent. — kwami (talk) 20:44, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Ok, Standards are based on different subdialects of Shtokavian dialect, addherit different grammar use (future making is just one example) and differs in the dictionary (only part of dictionary is common). What is the differance between standard Norwegian[[7]], Danish and Croatian and Serbian? Croatian uses new shtokavian ijekavian eastern herzegovian subdialect as standard, while Serbian uses new shtokavian ekavian Šumadija-Vojvodina (without talking of the historical development)? Čeha (razgovor) 10:53, 20 June 2010 (UTC).

Standard Croatian doesn't have even that much difference. Norwegian has two written standards, Dano-Norwegian (Bokmal) and native Norwegian (Nynorsk). Dano-Norwegian, though based on Danish, has been modified to accord better with Norwegian; it's as if Croats had taken Shtokavian and modified it to correspond more closely with Zagreb. Nynorsk is as if Croats had taken Zagreb directly as a second standard. The Serbo-Croatian situation really is quite unusual; only Hindi-Urdu seems to be comparable. — kwami (talk) 07:51, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Hm, are you realy calling Bokmal Dano-Norwegian? It is a language in which 85% of Norwegian communicate and is de facto synonim for Norwegian (as you can easily see on any linguistic map). Bokmal is based on south Norway speaches, as Croatian is based on Eastern Herzegovian (Mostar speaches), while standard Serbian is based on Vojvodina-Šumadija Novi Sad-Belgrade speaches. Dictionary for standard Croatian is taken from all of Croatian dialects (Kajkavian, Cakavian and Western Shtokavian) while dictionary for standard Serbian is taken from only eastern Shtokavian.

And there is nothing quite unusual in Croatian and Serbian languages; similar situation can be found in Scots/English, Leonese-Asturian/Castilian Spanish, modern Norwegian (Bokmal)/Danish, Karelian/Finish, Czech/Slovakian even German(Saxon)/Dutch and Spanish/Portuguese. It is a thing which happen to many nations which lived in common states--> shared parts of dictionary.

P.S. It is interesting why did you chose to compare Croatian with Norwegian and not to Danish, as standard Croatian uses west Shtokavian dialect which was originaly a dialect of wich in 19th century Croato-Serbian was inteded to be built.Čeha (razgovor) 11:55, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

P.P.S. Modern Montenegrin will be based (at least judging from the info on the wikipedia) on Zeta-subdialect, which makes it closer to standard Croatian and Bosniak(western Shtokavian) than Serbian (eastern Shtokavian), but also different subdialect. Čeha (razgovor) 12:21, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

It seems to me this is an unsuccessful attempt to talk, about Croatian language, to some people who would- for various purposes- try to present Croatian language as a derivative of an imagined Serbo-Croatian hybrid. Their main arguments have been rebutted, but since they show no respect for logic I'll just reiterate old stuff, revert the page & do this in future also, without addressing this page (in case nothing new appears).

• Croatian is both a standard language and a cluster of three dialects. Unlike Serbian or Bosnian, it is not based, but crystallized/stylized around corpus of literature written in štokavian-ijekavian & štokavian-ikavian (Andrija Kačić Miošić, Ivan Gundulić, Matija Divković, with significant imports from Čakavian and Kajkavian, mainly on lexical and phraseological levels. Croatian phraseology is three dialectal, as is vocabulary, and sometimes, word-formation (already mentioned examples of Kajkavian prefix "protu" as against Štokavian "protiv"- protutenkovski/anti-tank, protuustavno/anti-constitutional,...). From the beginning in the 1500s, Croatian štokavian literary language that was destined to become standard, ie. that we can find in works of Marin Držić, Dinko Ranjina, Dinko Zlatarić, Ivan Gundulić,..,have been mainly Štokavian -Ijekavian with significant import of Čakavian words [jur, zač, gospoje,..]. These words continue to be used in poetic speech- I've given contemporary translation of Torquato Tasso's major poem, replete with Čakavian words & phrases:http://www.matica.hr/www/wwwizd2.nsf/AllWebDocs/tasso/$File/Tasso-Trece%20pjevanje.pdf/Tasso-Trece%20pjevanje.pdf ; also, other contemporary Croatian translations use Ragusan idiom of mixed Štokavian-Čakavian- among others, translation of Francois Villon complete work:http://www.naklada-jurcic.hr/izdanja.php?kateg=16&sub=0 Also, contemporary Croatian literature remains to be written in Čakavian and Kajkavian literary languages: Miljenko Smoje: Velo misto, a novel (Split Čakavian: http://www.profil.hr/knjiga/velo-misto-prvi-dil/27989/ ), Pero Budak: I norija je meštrija, a novel in Kajkavian, http://arhiva.net.hr/kultura/page/2008/12/04/0520006.html

So- both Čakavian and Kajkavian literary languages continue to be vital parts of Croatian literature; and as the standard language is concerned, they- mainly Čakavian- tend to provide significant, and in some cases almost complete terminology: for instance, Croatian maritime & piscatorial terminology is almost completely Čakavian-sometimes derived from Italian and French assimilated terms- in origin, as attested by 2 volumes of Vojmir Vinja's Adriatic supplements to Petar Skok's etymological dictionary: http://www.profil.hr/autor/vojmir-vinja/3086/

And- these are the facts. There is no way one can pretend that:

a) only abstract standard language stylized around Štokavian grammar and basic lexis matters, since Croatian has been developed for centuries as a process in which Kajkavian and Čakavian augmented, lexically, phraseologically and stylistically, the Croatian Štokavian norm- unlike Bosnian, Montenegrin or Serbian

b) historically, a great part of Croatian literary heritage, does not belong, structurally, to the contemporary norm- a situation similar to the Greek koine, where some Greek literary dialects, like Aeolic, didn't become the nucleus for common Greek language, unlike Attic Greek. But, Greek literature is unimaginable without Sappho, who wrote in Aeolic, as is Croatian without Pavao Ritter Vitezović and Ivan Belostenec- who both wrote in a mixture of Čakavian, Kajkavian and Štokavian. And they lie completely outside of Serbian or Bosnian language norm and heritage.

c) even more important is Croatian linguistic purism- which has nothing to do with dialects as such-; a tendency for word-coinage, mainly from older Croatian- say, 13-15th century- and Church Slavic words. Croatian dictionaries like Mažuranić's "Prinosi za hrvatski pravno povjestni rječnik"/Contributions for a Croatian Historical Dictionary, cca.1800 pages, http://www.antikvarijat-studio.hr/shop/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=16304&products_id=79880 contain the Croatian legal terminology rooted in documents written in three dialects sprinkled with Church Slavic.

Proponents of the term "Serbo-Croatian" simply ignore the fact that their "language" has not one official name: sometimes, they give examples for Serbo-Croatian. Then, without further explanation, a Croatian and Serbian designation appears. In yet another circumstance, they present Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Such a protean name for a -so they say- living standard language is another example of political philology. Reverted. Mir Harven (talk) 19:22, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

"Croatian is both a standard language and a cluster of three dialects"

True. Do any of us dispute that?

"with significant imports from Čakavian and Kajkavian"

That's been disputed and I see no evidence for it. I guess that depends on what one takes to be "significant"; many of your examples are poetic, which could just be taken for separate C & S poetic traditions. But even if we take it as true, it does not alter the result.

"contemporary Croatian literature remains to be written in Čakavian and Kajkavian"

But we agree that those dialects are Croatian, and in any case, that does not deal with the C standard.

"only abstract standard language stylized around Štokavian grammar and basic lexis matters, since Croatian has been developed for centuries as a process in which Kajkavian and Čakavian"

Again, I'd like to see a RS that this is a significant part of everyday C speech, and that those daily elements have not found their way into B or S.

"Greek literature is unimaginable without Sappho"

Literary tradition is of course important. But again, how does that affect the language which people speak today?

"Croatian linguistic purism"

Yes, there was a big push for that a couple decades ago. However, just as with other attempts at top-to-bottom language reform, few of the proposals stuck, and since independence the desire for such reform seems to have abated.

"Proponents of the term "Serbo-Croatian" simply ignore the fact that their "language" has not one official name"

True, this is a problem. We have a language, of which Shtokavian is a dialect. The dialect, and therefore this language, includes BCMS. Now, it would be nice if there were a simple, well-known, and uncontroversial name for it, but there isn't. So we make do with the best available in English, which is SC.

But you're doing more than just replacing the term SC with some more neutral term like BCMS: you're deleting any reference to its existence. A Greek may legitimately dispute the "right" of Macedonia to use that name. But he can't erase the country from the map just because he doesn't like its name! You implied claim is that Shtokavian is a dialect of more than one language, which is linguistic nonsense. Croats and Serbs speak different standards of a polycentric language. Debate all you want about what we should call that language, but don't erase it from the map. — kwami (talk) 21:27, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it is like talking with a brick wall. It is interesting to see the proponents of so called SC, how do they explain the name (always SC, never CS), how they explain the fact that Serbian language is based on Vojvodina-Šumadija ekavian neoŠtokavian dialect, different dictionary etc.

Kwamikagami, maybe some people in serbia call their language sc, but majority of persons in Croatia, BiH and a lot in Montenegro call their languages by their national names. There exist Roman dialect continum and yet nowbody calls Spanish and Portuguese or Italian the same language (same thing whith Germanic languages in Netherlands/Germany or Scandinavia). If you speak about standards there is a clear difference between standard Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian/k and Montenegrin.

Only Serbian is basen on eastern neoShtokavian. Montenegrin is based on Zeta (sub)dialect of western neoShtokavian, while Croatian and Bosnian/k are based on eastern Herzegovian (Mostar's accent) of western neoShtokavian. There are substantional differences in accentuation between those parts of Shtokavian, and the difences in dictionary are large. Standard Croatian and Bosnian/k have also monosyllable ie, which is absent in standard Serbian and present as disyllablle in Montenegrin (wich even has sounds which are nonexistent in other standard languages like Ś Ź).

Dictionary in standard Croatian borows hevily from other local dialects (for example Serbs asked for subtitles of popular show of Gruntovčani, even as it is filmed in transitional dialect of Podravina wich Croats can understand without difficulty), in Bosnian/k from Turkish/Arabic literature, etc...

If Croatian and Bosnian/k were based on border dialect which members of other nations speak, that does not makes it the same language.

As I said before, majority of persons in Croatia (and neighbouring countries) call their language with it's national name (see the census of 2001), I do not know what are you trying to prove? What up-down changes? In Croatia mother's language of majority people is Croatian. There exist transitory subdialects (kajkavo-čakavian, kajkavo-štokavian,čakavo-štokavian and kajkavo-čakavo-štokavian), standard lanugage is something which was based on Mostar's dialect with some changes (like sound H) and in media dominant dialect is Zagreb's where majority of Croats live. Short summary; not trace of imaginary SC, which is the term wich may be popular in Serbia or between Bosnian Serbs (as they speek in dialect wich is closer to Croatian standard in accentuasation than standard Serbian).Čeha (razgovor) 09:18, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Now you are trying to introduce terms "western" and "eastern Shtokavian", for which I'm not sure how are defined, and I don't think are widespread in literature, because the are too vague. In terms that I'm familiar width, "Western Shtokavian"="ijekavian" and "Eastern Shtokavian"="ekavian".

For the most part, standard Serbian is based on (or, as Mir would prefer, stylized around) an amalgam of ekavian Šumadija-Vojvodina and ijekavian Eastern Herzegovinian dialect (which is the Vuk's dialect). Both being neo-shtokavian, their accentuation systems are more or less identical, but unstressed length in Šumadija-Vojvodina is not phonemic (well, as is the case in most Croatian vernaculars). Obviously, they differ in the jat reflex. All dictionaries, Croatian ones included, use 99% identical (Vukovian) accentuation with unstressed lengths pronounced, so your argument about different standardization basis is not exactly accurate. As a matter of fact, such standard accentuation is not always reflected in idiolects, even of professional speakers, and that deviation is largest in Croatian (Zagreb accent is a heavily influenced by kajkavian, and because of its dominant position it tends to spread). Still, those other accentuation systems are not standardized, and accent is still a relatively minor aspect of the language.

"Dictionary in standard Croatian borows hevily from other local dialects (for example Serbs asked for subtitles of popular show of Gruntovčani)" -- you call the language of Gruntovčani (for the uninitiated: a TV Series in authentic Kajkavian) "standard Croatian"?! I think that even residents of Dalmatia asked for subtitles of that, but you already knew that. I can tell you, however, that Serbs asked for subtitles of Zona Zamfirova as well, and nobody is trying to assert that it was "Standard Serbian".

Still, I don't know what you're arguing with, but a strawman. We all agree that majority of people, Serbs included, call their language by their national names. We all agree that there is no such thing as "Standard Serbo-Croatian". What I say, and 1.9 million of Google hits confirms, is that the term Serbo-Croatian, at least in English language, is not so imaginary, and is still used to denote all four national languages as a collectivity, with all their shared grammar, morphology and vocabulary. No such user (talk) 12:05, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

Those terms "eastern" and "western" can have two separate applications in this case, which may produce some confusion, so it might not be bad to delineate some basic facts here, though I'm sure that participants in this discussion are familiar with them. There are two major dialects of Shtokavian:

1) Staroštokavski ("Old Shtokavian"), spoken in eastern Serbia, which could be designated as eastern, and

2) Novoštokavski ("NeoShtokavian"), spoken in the rest of the Shtokavian territory, which could be designated as western.

Both of these major dialects have subdialects or varieties. The inception of standard Serbo-Croatian (srpskohrvatski, hrvatskosrpski, hrvatski ili srpski, etc.) has been marked by the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850, declaring that the language should be based on the "southern dialect", which is basically the eastern-Herzegovina variety or subdialect of NeoShtokavian (the native vernacular of Vuk Karadžić). This "southern dialect" has the ijekavian pronunciation of the old vowel ѣ (Yat). Another subdialect of NeoShtokavian is the Šumadija-Vojvodina variety (with the ekavian pronunciation of Yat), spoken in northern Serbia and Vojvodina. Since that territory contains the capital Belgrade, this subdialect is of a considerable influence in Serbia, but the accepted standard (official, literary) language has been the "southern dialect" (eastern-Herzegovina variety of NeoShtokavian) since the 19th century. A notable influence of the Šumadija-Vojvodina subdialect on the standard language in Serbia is the ekavian pronunciation of the standard. So, the ekavian (eastern) variant of standard Serbo-Croatian (and of course of standard Serbian today) is essentailly the ekavian pronunciation of the eastern-Herzegovina subdialect. The ekavian variant of standard Serbian should not be confused with the Šumadija-Vojvodina subdialect, which is in all of its three subvarieties (Šumadija, Valjevo-Mačva, and Vojvodina) distinct from the ekavian standard. This standard is used in most of Serbia, while the ijekavian (western) variant of standard Serbian is used in Montenegro and Republika Srpska, plus the rest of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia (in places where Serbs are still present there since 1995), but also in some parts of western Serbia, though nowadays rather marginally. Vladimir (talk) 16:02, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

To [8] While Croatian [9] has 86.200.000, and Serbian [10] 82.800.000 results, Bosnian [11] 13.200.000, Bosniak [Bosniak] 207.000, Montenegrin [12] 902.000 on google (all togheter 183.309.000) which is 100 times more than google entries about sc (of which majorty speaks about diferencess or history because official language in ex-Yu was CS or SC) should be more than enough to put imaginary sc to its resting place.

Second, both you and VVladimir are wrong about western and eastern SC. You both speak about that imagionary language, without fully knowing what it is :) A great joke. Here it is [13]. Before Novi Sad agreement in Yugoslavia existed two indipendent standards; Croatian and Serbian. See conclusion one in The text of the Novi Sad Agreement. How can somebody speak about something without the knowledge of its basics? That is a problem with all the proponents of SC/CS, lack of education on the matter.

In dialectology western Shtokavian includes Slavonian, East Bosnian (wich both are Shchakavian dialets), Bosnian-Dalimatian(western Ikavian) eastern Herzegovian and Zeta-South Sandžak, while eastern Shtokavian includes Šumadija-Vojvodina and Kosovo-Resava (somethimes and Timok-Prizren if Torlakian is counted as shtokavian). It is a difference based on historical differences as western Shtokavian developed from ShChakavian and eastern Shtokavian developed from Shtakavian, but in main most of the west shokavian dialects are ijekavian, jekavian and ikavian (virovitica and Podravina dialects are ekavian, as in Croatia Zagorje, but it is surface different) while eastern Shtokavian dialeckts use ekavian. Both eastern and western Shtokavian have neoShtokavian and old Shtokavian dialects(it can be seen from the maps, see maps [14] VVVladimir).

As for Serbian, majority of its users outside Serbia use ijekavian standard (if realy Standard Serbian has two standards, and not just one), all other languages are based from western Shtokavian (Croatian and Bosnian/k eastern Herzegovina, while montenegrin uses Zeta subdialect)

As for Gruntovčani, they spoke in Podravian dialect which is translational kajkavian to shtokavian, they are large numbers of words wich are used only coloqually and is very easy for any speaker of any croatian dialect to understand. So, there were no request for subtitles in Dalmatia (nor other parts of Croatia, just Serbia). Čeha (razgovor) 12:02, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

It is sometimes silly when persons which do not know nothing about Croatian Shtokavian dialect speak about its history, standard, etc :) This book is nice to start [15] Čeha (razgovor) 12:13, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Yes you should read it, because majority of what you wrote above is simply nonsense refuted in that very book.

should be more than enough to put imaginary sc to its resting place. - Wikipdia doesn't use Google hits as an "argument". Obviously you're very young and not versed in academic discourse.

Before Novi Sad agreement in Yugoslavia existed two indipendent standards; Croatian and Serbian. - Nonsense. By the tome of Novi Sad agreement literary Serbo-Croatian was in use for more than a century. There was a single standard with two literary varieties (separated chiefly by script and jat reflex), the same dictionaries and grammar books. NSA only codified existing practice to provide little space for nationalist deviations, such as the ones unsuccessfully enforced during NDH with Hrvatski državni ured za jezik.

It is a difference based on historical differences as western Shtokavian developed from ShChakavian and eastern Shtokavian developed from Shtakavian - that's also nonsense. "Western" and "Eastern" Štokavian are simply geographical designations, and those terms came into the with Croatian nationalist starting to use them to draw an artificial difference between "them" (Serbs, Eastern) and "us" (Croats, West). They're most certainly not diachronically justified. One can group isoglosses into dialect clusters an basically any arbitrary criteria. But what you're doing here with: "Both eastern and western Shtokavian have neoShtokavian and old Shtokavian dialects(it can be seen from the maps," - that just doesn't make sense at all. Neoštokavian dialects developed from Old Štokavian dialects (hence "neo" :). You're first classifying all the Štokavian dialects on the basis of some arbitrary geographical grouping into "West" and "East" (underlying the alleged ethno-national justification supporting such classification, despite the fact that these dialects developed 5-7 centuries ago when neither Croats nor Serbs, or their states, existed), and then dividing each of those groups into both Old Štokavian and Neoštokavian. It makes no sense whatsoever :)

As for Serbian, majority of its users outside Serbia use ijekavian standard (if realy Standard Serbian has two standards, and not just one), - Yes, Serbian has two standards, or one standard in two varieties if you will. Perhaps you should pay a visit to Republika Srpska and see it for yourself? :) It's very hard to patriotic Croats to come to terms with the fact that Ijekavian Neoštokavian is not exclusively "theirs".

all other languages are based from western Shtokavian - No, all of them are based on the same Neoštokavian, Eastern-Herzegovinian, istočnohercegovačko-krajiški... dialectal basis. You can call it "a form of Western Štokavian", but it's the same thing :) Citing from Ranko Matasović, Poredbenopovijesna gramatika hrvatskoga jezika, p. 34 hrvatski je suvremeni standardni jezik, službeni jezik Republike Hrvatske, koji se razvio na temelju samo jednoga narječja kojim govore Hrvati, i to narječja koje su kao osnovu za standardizaciju, u drugim povijesnim okolnostima, odabrali i drugi narodi (Srbi, Bošnjaci i Crnogorci). Mate Kapović [16]: Dijalekatski gledano, hrvatski su i srpski nedvojbeno jedan jezik. Josip Lisac, Hrvatska dijalektologija 1, štokavsko i torlačko narječje, p. 23: novoštokavski govori, idiomi koji su dijalekatnom osnovicom hrvatskoga književnog jezika. Oni pripadaju ikavskomu novoštokavskom dijalektu (ili zapadnom) i (i)jekavskomu obično zvanom istočnohercegovačkim (bolje: istočnohercegovačko-krajiškim) dijalektom.. Do we really need more evidence? :) --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:11, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Also, the paragrafh from the begining of this discussion should be returned back. If somebody which speaks another language does not see continuation in Standard Croatian from Bašćanska ploča to this days it is his/hers problem. If notthing this discussion showed folly of calling some language another name than it's own. Standard Croatian developed from Chakavian, Shchakavian to Shtokavian with inclusions from all other Croatian dialects (Chakavian-Kajkavian was standard of Croatian nobility in 17th century, in 18th and first half of 19th century it was standard Kajkavian on one third of Croatia around Zagreb and northwest border, when it was replaced by wider Croatian standard). All of this form are mutualy comprenhensible to today standard (as differences in old/middle/to days english). Claiming that Croatian language is something which begins only in 19th century as dialect of another language is gross falsificate and insult to reason. Čeha (razgovor) 13:47, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Modern standard Croatian has absolutely nothing to do with the language of Baščanska ploča. It's a direct continuation of former Western Serbo-Croatian standard, ultimately drawing on 19th century standardization efforts to create one literary language for all South Slavs on Easter Herzegovinian Štokavian dialectal basis. Chakavian-Kajkavian was never a "standard"; you don't seem to understand what that term means in sociolinuistics. As literary language, Čakavian and Kajkavian have been dead for centuries. There was never ever "standard Kajkavian" or "standard Čakavian", but various local dialects were used, that were very different from one another, in very different orthographies.

Claiming that Croatian language is something which begins only in 19th century as dialect of another language is gross falsificate and insult to reason. - You've been indoctrinated with infantile nationalism to the point that you cannot comprehend reality. I strongly suggest that you actually read some pre-19th literature as it was written. There is no "Croatian" in there. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 14:34, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

This is usual serbocroatist nonsense that has nothing to do with reality, as has pre-eminent contemporary Croatian linguist Radoslav Katičić testified in a recent interview: http://www.matica.hr/Vijenac/vijenac427.nsf/AllWebDocs/Srpski_jezik_nije_stokavski Mir Harven (talk) 19:12, 16 July 2010 (UTC)

Katičić spewing nationalist nonsenses as usual. He has to justify that 5-figure paychack that the governments hands him out every month, courtesy of the taxpayers. "Serbian language is not Štokavian" - ROTFL. High temperatures must have played the role in frying his brain! Another link for you: [17] -Ivan Štambuk (talk) 08:15, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Katičić is the greatest living Croatian linguist, and, perhaps, one of 3-5 greatest Croatian philologists of all time. And you- you're either insane or a self-hating Croatophobic Yugo phrase-monger beyond remedy. Mir Harven (talk) 19:56, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

The greatest living Croatian linguist by far is Ranko Matasović (not that he has many competition though). He is no philosopher whatsoever. The statement that Serbian language is not Štokavian is absolutely ridiculous to anybody who has any knowledge about the subject whatsoever. That is the problem with you nationalists: you don't believe in scientific method. You are like the religious people: there is only the "authority", and whatever the "authority" claims it is, it is. Even if the authority is self-contradictory at times (just like the Bible!), which is the case with Katičić as anyone can see, who a few years back claimed that Serbian and Croatian are one language in the link I provided. When he was paid by the Communists, this particular conviction was even more pronounced. In his 1988 book Jezik, srpskohrvatski / hrvatskosrpski, hrvatski ili srpski, co-written with his Serbian comrade Pavle Ivić, he calls the language "Serbo-Croatian, Serbian or Croatian", and states that it is "jezik Crnogoraca, Hrvata, Muslimana, Srba", glorifying "domete naše serbokroatistike". He's nothing but petty, fickle and opportunist ideologue of whomever pays him the most. I strongly suggest that you study other perspectives beside the nationalist one, e.g. the recently published Jezik i nacionalizam by the brilliant S. Kordić. You're living in the last century dude. Tuđman is dead and so are his isolationist world views. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 12:49, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

Not only paranoia, but an ill-informed paranoia. It was not Katičić, but Dalibor Brozović who had authored a study, along with Pavle Ivić, in 1980s (Katičić is not a co-author of any book or article with Pavle Ivić). Second- Brozović's theses can be understood in the context of Communist "linguistics", where individual linguists had to play by the rules of the Yugo-Communist "one language" (SC, CS, whatecer) policy (which, btw., you seem to appreciate. Not just the concept, but the environment that had given the limits of what could have been said.). Third- your "election" of Ranko Matasović to the status of foremost Croatian linguist would have amused the Croatian linguistic community, not the least Matasović himself. Fourth- you're so bogged & mired that the best therapeutic enterprise for you would be: put your SC language nonsense on paper, present it to the major contemporary Croatian linguists - say, 30-40 people- and wait what will they say about your idees fixes. Somehow I think I know the answer. Mir Harven (talk) 16:14, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

The majority of the Croatian linguists and paid by Croatian government, which is their only source of income. As a result, they views are completely biased towards the view that is being propagandized at the kroatistika department of FFZG and related institutions that produce an army of indoctrinated mediocre and sub-average "linguists". Matsović, in comparison to them, at least has some sorts of international credibility, manifested in forms of books and papers printed by foreign publishers, who wouldn't accept any kind of junk written by Katičić and his ilk.

That Serbo-Croatian is one and singular standard language is an immutable fact of reality. That you personally cannot come to terms with it, as well as many other Croats, does not refute or change that fact. To fight it, you resort to name-calling and shaming (by labeling your interlocutors as "Yugounitarists", "Croatophobes", etc.), as well as to deceptive propaganda such as stating that Serbian national variety of Serbo-Croatian is not based on Štokavian dialect (a bizarre statement that cannot be further from the truth), or that even Croatian national variety of Serbo-Croatian is not based on Štokavian dialect, which is likewise pure nonsense that you personally added to Croatian pedia article on Croatian language in this edit, after the article stated for 6 years that the Croatian national variety is based on ijekavian Neoštokavian.

Your efforts to bend the reality according to your nationalist convictions are ineffectual and pointless. Stop wasting everyone's time and get real. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:44, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

I think this is all getting a bit personal and argumentative. I would like to make a point so basic and obvious that I don't see how it can be contradicted (or considered to be OR or SYN) and then use that as a basis for some questions and comments that might point us in a more productive direction.

(Begin very obvious point)

It is obvious to me that two languages that are mutually intelligible to eachother's speakers and which differ only in a small number of matters, mostly minor, must be very closely connected in a way that non-mutually intelligible languages are not.

(End very obvious point)

The alternative, that two separate languages just happened to evolve from significantly different roots to become mutually intelligible, is simply too ludicrous to contemplate. You might as well claim that American English is derived from native American languages and that its similarity to British English is purely coincidental or a result of later convergence.

Now I won't claim to know the history of Serbian or Croatian languages but I strongly suspect it is analogous to British and American English in that it has diverged somewhat from a relatively recent common point due to geographical separation and different external and cultural influences while maintaining mutual intelligibility due to shared literature and the practicalities of trade. The common point could itself be a Mixed language of made of older and more distinct languages (I am not saying that it is, only that it could be without invalidating my argument) but, once mixed, languages can't be unpicked without losing mutual intelligibility, they can only drift apart maintaining their common roots. It seems to me that the common point can not be denied and any successor languages can't legitimately claim roots that ignore the common point. The real questions we should be addressing concern the correct name, age and classification of that common language.

Now I have no desire to deny the Croats their 900 years of literature but I would be interested to know what the 900 year old Croatian language of that literature was like? Would a modern Croat be able to read it in its original form, or would it be as incomprehensible to them as the original text of Beowulf is to me? Would it bother them if it was, or would they still be able to embrace it as their national literature? Why does this have to be so politicised? Can't we find some good unbiased sources and get to the truth of the matter? --DanielRigal (talk) 16:33, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

As an outsider, you have standard misconceptions (plus one correct obvious point) re Croatian language. I'll try, for umpteenth time, to write down the basics:

$ the situation with Croatian, Serbian etc. is not comparable to the British & American English case. Before any English settlement in Northern America, there was English language, spoken in England & in the south of Scotland. In next 3-4 centuries, the English-speaking settlers brought this language to the what will become the US, and this language, in the course of time, has undergone some changes which did not alter its structure & identity. Therefore, the common heritage of American & British language (Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Locke,..) is the same, and this makes English language a pluricentric language, as are other "colonial" languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French,..).

$ in contradistinction to this situation, Croatian and Serbian do not have a common "ancestor language". They are not variants of a pluricentric language, but different Ausbau languages or cultural languages. The closest example is the one with Urdu and Hindi and various Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian,..). There is not a common "ancestor language" for Croatian and Serbian (nor for Urdu and Hindi); the mutual intelligibility (to the very high degree) is the result of similar dialectal structure in both languages. So, there is no case that there had ever existed one, "Serbo-Croatian" (or you can use whichever name you want) language that had branched off or split into Croatian and Serbian at any moment in history. There was not one entity-language which dissolved into two (or more) entities- languages. This "one language" has never existed- although, for political reasons, not a few writers, linguists, politicians .. thought it did. They were confronted with a puzzle: they almost completely understood the "other" language (Serbian, Croatian); but, this other language was just this- other, not this one, foreign at all levels (script, language history, phraseology, vocabulary, scientific, cultural & technical terminology,...). In short- other.

$ briefly- Croatian and Serbian have converged- but have not fused- in the 19th century. Up to this, Croatian has had a few regional vernacular literary languages, interfering during ca. 4 centuries, out of which one in particular (enriched by other regional literary languages) emerged as a unified national language; Serbian, on the other hand, as was the case with other languages of Eastern Orthodox Slavic peoples, was written until the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, in mixture of Church Slavic and Serbian vernacular, plus a component of Russian language from the late 17th century on. Croatian is language written in three vernacular dialectal literary languages, from 14th century on, with final unification completed in the 19th century on one, Štokavian literary language. It is not "based" on any dialect, but stylized around mainly Štokavian literary language infused by other Croatian literary (not standard) languages. Contrary to this situation, Serbian is based on Štokavian dialect, without written corpus in the vernacular, and without the influence of other, Croatian, dialects and lexical-civilizational layers (in Croatian case, Catholic and marginally Protestant; in Serbian, Eastern Orthodox). Simplistically- Urdu is a "Muslim" language, Hindi a "Hindu" language; Croatian is a "Western Christian" language, Serbian an "Eastern Christian" language.

There you are. Mir Harven (talk) 20:24, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

That's more a political presentation than a linguistic one. From a dialectological POV, standard Hindi and Urdu are two official registers of a single dialect (Khari Boli) of one language, which goes by the labels Hindi-Urdu and Hindustani. Similarly, standard Serbian and Croatian are two official registers of a single dialect (Shtokavian) of one language, which goes by the labels Serbo-Croatian and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Yugoslavia posited a SC standard (or really bi-standard), and many nationalists cannot seem to move past that political history. But while relevant to the history and sociology of the language, it's irrelevant to its classification. If, for example, Hindi and Urdu had chosen Awadi and Dakkini as their standard forms, there would be little problem calling them separate languages. Likewise, if Croatian and Serbian had chosen Chakavian and Torlokian as their standards, there would be little problem calling them separate languages (this is basically what you have with Macedonian and Bulgarian). But Hindi and Urdu are both based on Khari Boli, and are completely mutually intelligible; likewise, Croatian and Serbian are both based on (not "stylized around", whatever that odd phrase is supposed to mean) Shtokavian, and are also completely mutually intelligible. Dialectologically, both cases are unitary languages, even if sociolinguistically they are distinct. Thus, while we have separate articles for Hindi, Urdu, Croatian, and Serbian, as befits them sociolinguistically, we unify them in non-socio contexts: Hindi-Urdu phonology, Hindi-Urdu grammar, WP:IPA for Hindi and Urdu, Serbo-Croatian phonology, Serbo-Croatian grammar, WP:IPA for Serbo-Croatian. — kwami (talk) 08:16, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

You're hopelessly entangled in the web of your own preconceptions.

1) there is no such thing as "political" presentation of a language, and especially confronted to the "linguistic one". For reality of language status and description is something beyond politics, sociology, linguistics and whatnot. The language (any) is a commonly accepted reality, and first and foremost, determined by those who speak it. The consensus of the community of a language speakers is the ultimate say on the status of a language. And for dialectological POV- what about it ? It- I suppose you mean linguistic typology- is just one strand in the description of a status of language- which is given primarily by a consensus of its speakers (Chinese language, where linguists opinions of whether these are dialects of a language of different languages is of not much importance- the power of 4.000 years of Chinese history is stronger than some scholastic prescriptions European linguists tried to concoct in order to make their field sound more "scientific" (which, of course, is not when compared to the exact sciences). I've seen your unsupported reiterations before; I've seen your evasions of arguments you simply couldn't answer (for instance, my deprecation of dialects obsession in the case of Greek language and Aeolic and Ionic.

2) so, just a reiteration that will not change much. Wiki dogmatists will continue until this project has been eroded; Croatian language & its status, happily, do not depend, in the slightest degree, on some Web scribbling.

$ Macedonian language and Bulgarian language are both "closer", more mutually intelligible and the rest, then are Croatian and Serbian- never mind the slightly different dialectal structure of both languages. But- how would you know ? You don't know: Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Macedonian,. Here we have a case of a virgin in a role of a sex counsellor.

$ Language is not a dialect, which is something anyone with even the slightest knowledge of this discipline, linguistics, should know. What you try to say is that according to linguistic typology, or typological linguistics, Croatian and Serbian have the same structure. Fine, no one disputes this. Just- this is a) not the criterion for languages classification, just one among many. Second- this criterion is not respected in other cases (which shows that this supposedly impartial criterion- whatever its worth- is, as are other endeavors in humanist disciplines, pretty flawed: there is not one "supra-language" in numerous classifications of Hindi and Urdu, no macro-language Hindi-Urdu, while there is a macro-language "Serbo-Croatian", or hbs, or whatever its name. So- a glaring inconsistency). Third- this is just one strand in the description of a language profile, other including theoretical linguistics disciplines from phonology to stylistics and semantics. In short- linguistic typology describes a skeleton of a language. Other disciplines, from syntax to lexicon, from phraseology to word-formation (not to be confused with morphology) give the equivalents of a gland system, CNS, circulatory system etc.

$ at the end: which are your qualifications and capacity to decide and edit a part of encyclopaedia on such complex matters ? You don't know a thing about Croatian and Serbian & you're absolutely incapable of deciding what' right & what's wrong. How many phonemes does Croatian have ? Is the standard Croatian based on some Štokavian dialect or not ? Of course, you don't know, since you can't read- and even didn't hear about linguists who worked hardly on this question, like Josip Vončina, Branka Tafra, Radoslav Katičić, Miro Kačić,.. Or- although some older linguistic books did have lump together Hindi and Urdu in a Hindi-Urdu/Urdu-Hindi "language", no serious works do this any more. So- how have you the temerity to put together these two languages, on the wiki which is- at least formally- against original research ? Does this original research include dated conceptual frameworks, for instance Aristotelian physics or Hindi-Urdu grammar ? Too much questions & barely an answer (aside from usual "nationalist" mantras). You've mixed up virtually everything: reduction of a status of a language to the linguistic typology (which you referred to, wrongly, as dialectology); dialectal structure of the Croatian language; mutual intelligibility and dialectal structure; theoretical linguistics and the description of a language (and its impotence in describing a language status); confusing and contradictory status of a macro-language, which in the case of Croatian and Serbian, supposedly, exists, and in the case of Urdu and Hindi- does not.

Anyway, a waste of time.Mir Harven (talk) 20:46, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

"The consensus of the community of a language speakers is the ultimate say on the status of a language" - This is essentially what your "argument" boils down to. You ignore all the scientific (linguistic) evidence, and present the opinion of speakers as an ultimate arbiter on "what decides a language". Croatian nationalism has infected your brain to the point that you are ready to disregard all dissenting opinions (foreign, neighboring Bosnian and Serbian, historical and even contemporary Croatian). You fail to understand that this viewpoint is just another viewpoint, not the ultimate Truth that we are bound to blindly follow. That point of view certainly deserves to be mentioned, but from the objective perspective of the ultimate observer (per WP:NPOV), not as a fact of reality per se. Croats don't "own" the language they speak. There is no such thing as "linguistic self-determination" or "linguistic sovereignty". You cannot unilaterally ignore centuries of history, or worse - the opinions of the rest of the world. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 14:36, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

I would suggest that you cease "answering" (if this is the description) my posts, since I've stopped reading anything you sign. Some time before, I thought your opinions to have been a valid- wrong, but valid- take on languages identities question. After all has been said, all the distortions you've made, all the lies (re differences with Croatian and Serbian languages percentages; your negation of Croatian language existence in past 2, 6, 8,.. centuries; your dogmatic rehashing of dated Slavic philology of early 1800s & equally outmoded fixation on dialectology; your vulgar & completely unfounded accusations of moral and scientific integrity of leading Croatian linguists; your behind-the scenes manoeuvres in trying to forcibly lump different languages under the umbrella term of a "language" spoken nowhere in the world (and trying to justify this by a few basic textbooks written by authors whose Croatian language skills are nowhere near to the authors' you've vilified in your ramblings; your completely irrational effort to rewrite the history of Croatian language & put it into the Procrustean bed by chopping ideologically undesirable hands and legs; as if valuable first class Croatian language studies, grammars, dictionaries, ...are not worked upon the very moment I'm writing this (http://zprojekti.mzos.hr/page.aspx?pid=97&lid=1&progID=382&projID=494 , http://zprojekti.mzos.hr/public/c2prikaz.asp?cid=1&psid=32, http://zprojekti.mzos.hr/public/c2prikaz.asp?cid=2&psid=32 )- this is meaningless. I don't consider you to be a person of moral integrity, mental capability & fundamental fairness, to bother anymore with anything you post. Mir Harven (talk) 20:43, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

You're like child: sticking fingers in your ears and singing "lalala, I don't hear you", whenever somebody refutes the essence of your arguments. I know you very well MH, your nationalist self-victimizing psyche and fallacious methods of discussing. You are nothing. Constantly disparaging your interlocutors and invoking the Holy Argument of Speaker's Self-Identity means nothing. You're no different than the Communist propagandists who accused every dissident of being agent provocateur, paid by "foreign capital" to spread discord and hatred. We are not stupid, and have crystal-clear bird's eye view on your activities. Paid Croatian state propagandists will never change the nature of reality, no matter how many times you reiterate the "Croatian is a separate language" mantra. Croatian will never be a separate language, as long as it shares the same Eastern Herzegovinian dialectal basis with Serbian/Bosnian. Your efforts are futile. You can reprint all the old Serbo-Croatian dictionaries and grammars, but this time titled as "Croatian" dictionaries/grammars, but as long as the content is the same, it means nothing. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:46, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for common sense input Daniel! Just a few remarks:

• Now I won't claim to know the history of Serbian or Croatian languages but I strongly suspect it is analogous to British and American English in that it has diverged somewhat from a relatively recent common point due to geographical separation and different external and cultural influences while maintaining mutual intelligibility due to shared literature and the practicalities of trade. - Actually, it's not directly comparable to the situation with Englishes around the globe, and the situation is even more simple. First, if you look at the map, you'll see that there is no geographical separation at all. It's all one giant dialect continuum, inseparable along ethnic lines. You can also see that countries such as Croatia and entities such as Republika Srpska have a very weird shape, which results from the fact that they were created along some imaginary criteria such as the ethnicity of the people inhabiting those areas when these border lines where drawn/carved in a war. Now, if you look at the dialect map for Štokavian dialect, you'll see that the subdialect that all of the modern-day countries used to codify their "national standard", and what is labeled as "East Herzegovinian" on the map, is shared across both national and ethnic borders. (And it is no accident that the only dialect that is shared byall the ethnicities was chosen as the literary standard in the 19th century...although today the nationalists would claim that it was an "independent choice", which is ridiculous). So in essence, there is no real "separation" in linguistic terms, like there exists for Englishes (which evolved in separate routes along the centuries due to real geographic separation, and which caused differences in word meanings, different vocabulary, different pronunciation of words despite the same shared orthography etc.) : there is only the imagination that what "we" speak is one kind of entity, and what the "others" (the other two ethnicities) speak is some other kind of entity, and that "we" have a "right" to call our speech X language, regardless how different/same is it to what others speak and call their speech. Modern Englishes are much different than B/C/S varieties. I have an international edition of Oxford Advanced Learner's dictionary which I use, and basically in every other headword there are meanings/spellings/variant forms that are labeled for a specific English variety (NA, UK, NZ, AU, CA). In modern SC national varieties the differences are much less pronounced.
• Would a modern Croat be able to read it in its original form, or would it be as incomprehensible to them as the original text of Beowulf is to me? - Baška tablet is taught in Croatian schools, and in many cases pupils need to memorize that trivial document by heart. I can assure you they they understand it as much as they would understand any other distant Slavic language (eg. Russian, Polish). It's completley beyond their grasp to read it and understand it. Every single word of it has either phonemes that died out centuries ago (e.g. yers, yat, nasal vowels) and which they don't have a clue what they mean and how they are read, or inflectional endings that also died out centuries ago. Yes it's pretty much comparable to Beowolf or Chaucer from the perspective of modern English speaker. You could with some luck even discern every other or third word, but hardly the whole meaning of a sentence. This observation is also valid for an entire body of historical "Croatian literature". In high school kids are forced to read literary junk such as Judita or Ribanje i ribarsko prigovaranje which were written only 4-5 centuries ago, and which they can barely understand, so these old works are usually published with sizable dictionaries accompanying them. Or, for example, with side-by-side original and the translation to modern language, such as in this version of Judita published by the foremost Croatian cultural institution Matica hrvatska. One should also keep in mind that the majority of Croats are not particularly literate or educated (~7% have college education), and that such works are usually an instrument of attention of overpaid smug nationalist-philologists working in various state-sponsored institutes or agencies. This historical woks however do not have the same status as e.g. Shakespeare in English, not by any criteria. They're not read by ordinary people at all, and their authors are being treated as some mythical figures from the past that nobody gives a damn about today.
• Would it bother them if it was, or would they still be able to embrace it as their national literature? In the Balkans, nationalism is the most powerful force governing the society. They don't care if they don't understand a single word, if the related literary work is of paramount importance in nationalist self-identification. This leads to scenarios where the works of some writers such as Ivo Andrić are classified both as "Croatian writers" and "Serbian writers" (see the categories), depending on the nationalist viewpoint. It has absolutely nothing to do with language. There is a host of Croatian linguists and writers that have over 2 centuries openly embraced the common literary standard on Eastern Herzegovinian dialect, and which are despite that classified here (on English pedia) as "Croatian writers". This has more to do with the willingness to isolate from your "neighbors" and to embrace under your fragile identity umbrella as much as you can from the history, rather than with some objective criteria of classification such as the intelligibility of the writings.
• Why does this have to be so politicised? Because these new "languages" have been created de facto by a political decree. They don't exist by any objective scientific criteria. Negating their isolationist existence amounts to an "attack" on people's fragile ethnic/national identities. Bosniaks/Croats/Serbs are so "similar" in language, customs, appearance (genetic makeup)...that ridiculing or ignoring the over-emphasized minor differences among them amounts to a full-blown attack on their separte existence in the first place. There is also this 19th century nation-building myth of country=language=people, that is still very much alive in the region, fueling the entire debate. You'll hear repeated statements of how "people have a right to their language", as if there exists some "linguistic self-determination" granted by a UN charter ^_^
• Can't we find some good unbiased sources and get to the truth of the matter? - Sure, and many of them have been provided here many times. But the natives don't think that foreign sources are reliable enough, and think of them as "obsolete" (see the above comment by Mir Harven: "rehashing of old Slavic philology from the early 19th century"). According to them, the only sources presenting the "real" truth are the ones published by the nationalist institutions. They don't even want to account for domestic dissidents ridiculing their views. Their are many modern Croatian linguists that do see and accept B/C/S as de facto one language linguistically, but they are "traitors"... :) And I mentioned Mir Harven above the just recently published book by S. Kordić, which is a landmark contribution in the critique of Croatian linguistic nationalism and isolationism, but he conveniently ignored it. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 12:53, 22 July 2010 (UTC)