Talk:Croatian language/Archive 2

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"Serbo-Croatian" confusions revisited

Apart from a few bemused & disinterested "visitors", it seems to me that most of the "initiative" to revive a "Serbo-Croatian" corpse comes from mourners of the failed Yugoslav experiment. So, the motivation is eminently political & ideological. Since arguments pro & con tended to be diffused and confused, I'll enumerate a few cardinal points.

1. there are no world English-language eminent slavicists writing today. Some, like Greenberg, have published pamphlets on the language(s) destruction, but these works are of no philological importance. It would take us too long just to count the falsities in Greenberg's book.

2. but, the whole idea of "foreign" experts as something crucial regarding an eminently national subject is ridiculous. The best experts on Croatian language are Croatian linguists. And the majority of them, who described the structure & charted the history of Croatian language (Dalibor Brozović, Radoslav Katičić, Stjepan Babić,..), tend to agree on the following points:

• Croatian as an individualized common language has emerged somewhere between 1500 (Babić) and 1750 (Brozović), as a three dialects language, with Croatian Western Štokavian serving as the axis around various Čakavian and Kajkavian dialects accrued

• Croatian does not have a dialectal basis- meaning it has been "built" "upon" (Štokavian) dialect(s). It has been stylized, for ca. 4 centuries around Dubrovnik & Bosnian Western Štokavian and Čakavian dialects. Eastern Štokavian & Torlakian dialects did not play any role in the proces of its crystallization, from accentuation to stylistics (unlike, for instance, Serbian and Montenegrin).

• description of a language is given in two or three books: normative dictionary, normative grammar and, perhaps, normative stylistics (one could add phraseology or, in Croatian case, an orthography). Leaving for a moment Montenegrin and Bosnian side, Croatian and Serbian overlap in ca. 80% of their grammatical and lexical content: http://www.vjesnik.com/Html/2000/06/01/ClanakTx.asp?r=kul&c=1 Taking into account yat reflexes as the de facto demarcation line (not to speak of the script), overlapping is, lexically, slightly less than 50%.

• three levels of description are regularly confused: genetic, typological-structural and normative (standardological). In all three levels there is no sense nor need for Serbo-Croatian designation. Genetically and typologically, the umbrella term for Croatian and Bosnian and Serbian and Montenegrin is Western South Slavic. Standardologically, this term is also incorrect and offensive, since:

a) Croatian is a three dialects tongue, with Croatian Štokavian dialects serving as nucleus for standardization & Kajkavian and Čakavian added to the language "alloy". Serbian and Montenegrin are based (not stylized) on Eastern Štokavian dialects (Bosnian on Western Štokavian)- all three without any Čakavian and Kajkavian influence in phonetics, morphology, syntax, lexicon and stylistics.It is incorrect re Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin since the implied use of the term "Serbo-Croatian" is, typology-wise, inclusive of Čakavian and Kajkavian dialects.

b) the entire approach of the "Serbo-Croatian" partisans is a dated neo-grammarian one. A "language" is much more than the basic grammar (phonology, morphology, basic syntax). Just as it is irrational to try to reduce a physical body to the skeleton, and leave aside muscular, neurological, endocrine, .. systems- it is the same with the language, which consists also of accentuation, dictionary, complete syntax, stylistics, semantics, phraseology, specialized terminology,.. And in these areas lie crucial differences between Western South Slavic languages.

c) one encounters double standards in languages classification. As has been noted, Hindi and Urdu (closer than Serbian and Croatian, for what's worth) are not put under Hindi-Urdu umbrella; neither are Danish and Norwegian Rijksmal. This double-standard policy is best illustrated with macro-language classification: http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/ISO_639_macrolanguage So- according to this, Croatian and Serbian and Bosnian are parts/variants of a macrolanguage http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/ISO_639:hbs#hbs But, lo and behold: there is no macro-language which would serve as umbrella language for Urdu and Hindi, or Bahasa Indonesia and Malay. Typical double standard.

Uhm, what do you call Hindustani and Malay? But you're right in that Ethnologue is not a very consistent ref, which is why it shouldn't be relied upon too heavily. kwami (talk) 16:05, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

More, the question is: is there need to coin (or use an old one) an "umbrella term" for such similar languages like Urdu and Hindi or Bosnian and Serbian ? Or, if the answer is "yes"- how to do this without causing a confusion of interpretative levels, typological-structural and standardological ? How to point out that an "umbrella language" is not a "real one", in the sense of being a coherent communication tool ? Mir Harven (talk) 18:24, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes there is. We need labels for things. If Croats were to decide that they were not Slavs, but Illyrians, and therefore rejected the label "Slav", we would still use it, because that's how RS's classify it, and because it's the word that's used for it in English. And of course the language is a "real" one: Croats and Serbs talk together every day, and they don't need a translator. There is even that (perhaps apocryphal) story of a Bosnian demanding a translator in a Croatian court (or was it the other way around?), the point of which was to illustrate how this is as much politics as anything. If Hindi and Urdu speakers are talking together, and you ask the Urdus what the Hindis are speaking, they'll say "Urdu", and if you ask the Hindis what the Urdus are speaking, they'll say "Hindi", because they literally can't tell the difference in everyday speech. Now, whether you want to call that language "Hindustani" or "Hindi-Urdu" or "Urdu-Hindi" is secondary. Similarly, what we call BCMS is secondary, but in English the WP:Common name is SC. The US Foreign Service Institute, for example, has courses in "Serbo-Croatian". That's what English speakers know it by. kwami (talk) 18:53, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

That's not apocryphal story nor is that need "pure political invention". I've told Kwamikagami 1 day earlier [1] about this article in Serbian magazine Danas, that spoke about court translators (CRO to SER, SER to CRO)Sunđer, pardon, spužva. Professional court translators have told "Opasno je tumačiti po sistemu “razumemo se” naročito u pravu, farmakologiji, građevini" (translation: It's dangerous to translate according to "we understand each other", especially in the law, farmacology, arhitecture.) They also told "Potrebna je mnogo veća koncentracija kad prevodite sa srpskog na hrvatski, nego sa srpskog na engleski" (Translating from Serbian to Croatian needs more concentration than translating from Serbian to English). This wasn't told by "nationalist linguists, politicians or Wikipedists", but by professional court translators. About "common name", English speakers know language as Croatian, since they see bilingual internet pages as CRO/ENG, not to mention tourists that come to Croatia and talk to Croats. Kubura (talk) 03:41, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

First one for mutual intelligibility. This is a tricky one, since import of foreign lexemes can greatly reduce or even destroy understanding. For instance, although they speak dialects of Štokavian, Bosniak/Bosnian Muslim's speech was frequently unintelligible for their Croatian and Serbian neighbors, due to massive absorption of Arabic and Turkish loan-words in various fields, from genealogy to medicine. This had been abruptly changed by mass exodus of Bosnian Muslim intelligentsia following the Austro-Hungarian occupation 1878. Now we see the reverse trend- first Bosniak religious newspapers, then- to a lesser degree- "secular" papers, are reintroducing terminology rooted in Arabic-Islamic culture. Or- due to many similar traits, from phonetics to syntax & Italian loan-words, Croatian Štokavian speakers from Dubrovnik and Croatian Ćakavian speakers from Mljet or Hvar did have easier communication than, say, Croatian Štokavian speakers from Dubrovnik and Serbian Štokavian speakers from Serbia (Belgrade, Kragujevac,..- many Turkish loan-words). Also- "neighbors" don't have a problem in communication, but this isn't quite so with the "edges" of speech-area. So much for intelligibilty & insistence on dialects. Another point is, IMO, more vital: US or UK language policy. We see that it is changing. SC has disappeared as a standard langauge, but still lingers on as a macrolanguage, with a bizarre label: acronym is hbs, and the name is "Serbo-Croatian" (therefore, offensive to Bosniaks and Montenegrins, whatever UK or US language policy deems correct- if they learn a non-existent language (or a mixture, Western Balkans Esperanto) & cannot, in conversation with Croatian, Bosnian,.. speakers, name it the way they used to- this policy is clearly rotten and self-contradictory. Mir Harven (talk) 11:38, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

This is all vital information which we definitely need to cover. I'm not disputing any of that. But that's the reason we have separate articles for these standards in the first place. If they were all the same, we'd have one consolidated Serbo-Croatian article and say "also called Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, or Serbian" in the lead. We don't do that for the kinds of reasons you just gave. There are similar issues with Khariboli Hindi and Urdu: utterly indistinguishable when talking on the street, but often mutually unintelligible in academia. But you have the same thing in English: every new generation, and many ethnic groups (especially when discriminated against), come up with slang to try to make their language their own, and as a consequence it may become largely unintelligible to their parents / neighbors. But linguists call these "registers" rather than "languages", since the underlying grammar and phonology is the same, and because they're socially constructed. The language in the non-sociolinguistic sense is still one, and the name for that one in English is Serbo-Croatian. It's unfortunate that some people find this offensive, and eventually that may result in the adoption of a new name in English: "nash-yezik" maybe! We see that in the abortive BCS and CWSS. But in the meantime, SC is the English name for this language, and the best we can do is explain to our readers that some do find this offensive, just as Hindus may be offended if you call their language "Urdu" and Indonesians may be offended if you call their language "Malay". (Indonesians used to sternly correct me when I said I spoke "Malay", even though I didn't speak any differently than I did in Malaysia, apart from a few contractions and Dutch rather than English technical terms. But for me it was obviously the same language.)

Oh, and before you say that my example with English slang is irrelevant because it's "slang", it really is the same phenomenon. Whether it's kids at school or in the street coming up with new words, or academics in the university or bureaucrats in the govt coming up with new words, the result is the same: a socially conscious change in vocabulary to consolidate group identification. For one you could say it's "just slang", and for the other you could say it's "just jargon", but both arguments dismiss a group of people as not having the right to use their language as they see fit. From a sociolinguistic POV, they're equivalent.

Another example from English is in the legal, financial and insurance industries and some academic fields. They've attempted to make their language impervious to outsiders while still calling it "English". Here the motivation isn't so much to own the language as to consolidate their job security by making it difficult for outsiders to do their work. But the result is the same: different often mutually unintelligible registers of what is underlyingly the same language. — kwami (talk) 18:09, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't think that languages are classified according to typological-structural linguistics (save in linguistic typology). And, even in this context, the term "Serbo-Croatian" is bizarre and imprecise: dialectology-wise, Serbian is not "composed" of Kajkavian and Čakavian (which has been implied with this concept)- unlike Croatian. Using a language classification tree (or staircase), the term language is meant to imply both dialects and standard language. And both typologically and standardologically (I think that sociolinguistics is too narrow a discipline since the "final product" of a standard language is something "soaked" in history of standardization), Croatian and Serbian are not offshoots of a language- on the typological level, they differ in dialectal structure; on standardological, they are two standard languages & not variants of a standard language. As for the second contention, the case is simple: there is one significant difference between pluricentric standard languages (English, Spanish/Castillan, German,..) and different similar languages (perhaps Kloss's term Ausbau languages is the closest to the truth) like Croatian and Serbian, Urdu and Hindi: the speakers of pluricentric languages (Spanish, English) consider that they speak variants of one language, all cultural appendage considered; on the other hand, speakers of Ausbau languages like Croatian and Serbian don't think they speak one language- all cultural appendage considered. Milton, Samuel Johnson or Gibbon do belong to the language history of, say, Australian and British English; however, Marko Marulić, Marin Držić or Matija Divković belong to the history of Croatian language only, not Montenegrin, Serbian or Bosnian- or, for that matter, "Serbo-Croatian", which in this context, doesn't mean anything. It's absurd to say that, say, charters of Serbian saint St. Sava had been written in Serbian variant of "Serbo-Croatian", since Croats in no way enter the story here. The same with other examples. Mir Harven (talk) 20:41, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

d) by putting a "Serbo-Croatian" (non-existent, save in political linguists classifications) "language" on the same level of relevance as are Arabic or Norwegian, one suggests that the "Serbo-Croatian" is, somehow, a true "entity", and Bosnian or Croatian or .. are specific realizations (variants, versions) of this "entity". Which is completely wrong. Because, simply, "Serbo-Croatian" is not and has never been an "entity" (so to speak). It was just a temporary cover term without any substance, and impossible to be realized either in speech or in text. As Croatian writer Tomislav Ladan has said- referring to the term coined by Croatian linguist Kruno Krstić, this centaur-like term for centaur-like "language" is no more meaningful than horse-donkey centaur-term for a non-existent species of a quadruped. Mir Harven (talk) 18:48, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

I thought I was the one mostly behind the initiative here. I care nothing about Yugoslavia, and have no emotional attachment to it, to Croatia, or to Serbia. I have taken the same approach, and with much of the same nationalist backlash, to Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu, where Standard Hindi is a standardized register of Urdu, though few will admit it, and Urdu = Khari Boli is a dialect of Hindi, though few will admit that either) and to Malay (Malaysian-Indonesian, where Indonesian is a group of dialect derived from one of the Malasian dialects of Malay). Excluding the abortive Moldavian, and a few Usonians who say they speak "American", these three are the most egregious cases of national standards parading as independent languages. People have brought up Scandinavian as a counter-example, but at least those standards are based on separate dialects, whereas the BCSM, Hindi-Urdu, and Malaysian-Indonesian are each based on the same dialect. On the opposite extreme is Chinese, and to a lesser extent Arabic and German, which purport to be single languages despite in many cases a total lack of mutual intelligibility. As an encyclopedia, one of our jobs should be to show where the local conception of "language" is likely to differ from that of our readers, where we're discussing ethnicity or literature rather than intelligibility. This is certainly the case for Croatian: If you speak two languages, you are bilingual. If you speak Chakavian and Shtokavian you're officially monolingual, but closer to being bilingual than if you speak Standard Croatian and Standard Serbian.

BTW, the US Foreign Services Institute still trains American diplomats in "Serbo-Croatian",[2] This is the common use of the term in English, and Croatian sensitivities of what Srpskohrvatski mean in Croatian, while of interest to the article, should not be used to override WP:Common name and WP:English. kwami (talk) 19:38, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Mir Harven please spare us of you longish nationalist fairy tales. The term Serbo-Croatian is still widely used in English (and German, Russian, Dutch...). The classification of Croatian under the same clade that would also encompass other Štokavian standards is just common sense. We don't care if you're "offended" by the term. The common classification is imperative. Your statements of "three-dialectal Croatian with no particular basis" are just absurd. If you cannot provide credible evidence supporting such claims (which you can't, and I can cite you plenty of counter-evidence claiming otherwise), we're not interested. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 01:34, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Better try to update your knowledge: http://www.jutarnji.hr/-misljenje-da-je-hrvatski-zasnovan-na-srpskom-dijalektu-vrlo-je-zivo-u-srbiji-/180208/ Mir Harven (talk) 12:03, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Is that the best you can get, some sensationalist headline from a cheap tabloid? Come on! Not so long ago, comrade Katičić was singing completely different tune . --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 13:02, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

With every new line you get entangled more & more: the article on Katičić's statement in "Jutarnji list" is a correct & intelligible elaboration; the article in "Slobodna Dalmacija" is a conceptual mess & not supported by anything Katičić has said (one can verify his position here: http://www.ihjj.hr/#vijecezanormu ) So: 1) the article in "Slobodna Dalmacija" is a sensationalist lie, similar to their other "discoveries" (http://arhiv.slobodnadalmacija.hr/20060207/kultura01.asp - another concoction Pranjković, whatever his other blunders, has never endorsed), 2) your labelling of Katičić as "comrade" (for someone who has never belonged to any political party or movement) has exposed your position completely. Mir Harven (talk) 16:06, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Dear Ivan Štambuk,
have you ever read the message of our dear colleague Ivan Štambuk, written here on wiki, on this very page. He nicely explained so-called Serbo-Croatian issue here [3]
"Dear Serbo-Croatian comrades,... you...having been indoctrinated by books written by ex-professors of "Serbo-Croatian languages" who graduated "Yugoslavistics", which for pure political reasons pushed the notion of "Serbo-Croatian dialects" as an alleged "genetic node" in the South Slavic branch. This notion of abundantly exploited for misappropriation of Croat-only cultural heritage, of which there are plenty of remnants in modern Serbian books (...bugaršćice by Molise Croats and medieval Čakavian writers like Hektorović as a part of "Serbian epic poetry"...)...".
Colleague Ivan Štambuk nicely told that. Ivan Štambuk, I hope you won't tag Ivan Štambuk as "nationalist that tells fairy tales". Kubura (talk) 02:44, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

No you insolent nationalist troll, I was persuaded otherwise for years ago, as you know it very well. That's what intelligent people do when confronted with counter-evidence. Bigoted fundamentalist just repeat their old dogmas for over and over again. Get over it Kubura, your imaginary "three-dialectal Croatian" is just a fairy tale, and anybody with 3 brain cells can see that that myth has nothing to do with reality. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 04:42, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Okay, attacking each other isn't going to get us anywhere. All of the reliable sources support Ivan. That's all we need. If some people don't like it, then they need to find the evidence to persuade us otherwise. If they do not care to engage in rational, civil debate, then they can and should be ignored. kwami (talk) 05:04, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

No, they don't. Btw- which are the "reliable sources" & which is the criterion for identifying ones ? Reliable sources, as far as Croatian language goes & for Croatian language native speakers, are works of linguists Radoslav Katičić, Stjepan Babić et al.- and they don't support "Serbo-Croatian" phantasm. Mir Harven (talk) 12:46, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to see any sources that are not simply empty prosaic statements with charged political overtones. For example, to state that e.g. "standard Croatian is based on three equally-treated dialects", without providing actual evidence to support such claims, especially when abundant counter-evidence can be cited, is no use whatsoever. There is the reality, the real state of affairs, and there is the wishful thinking and propaganda. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and for them no singular "authority" would suffice. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 13:09, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Croatian, Serbian, and Slovenian?

An editor, Ex13, is insisting that Croatian and Serbian are no closer to each other than they are to Slovenian. Am I the only one who thinks this is nonsense? Of course, I recognize that all of South Slavic is a dialect continuum, so theoretically we could say that Bulgarian belongs here to, but would we? Can anyone explain to me why we should present South Slavic as,

South Slavic	Croatian Slovenian Serbian Bosnian Montenegrin

as if they were all equally distant lects, rather than as,

South Slavic	Slovenian  SC  Croatian Serbian Bosnian Montenegrin

showing that BCSM have an especially close relationship? Whatever the politics in the Balkans, I don't want to mislead our readers into thinking that, despite their separate standards, that these are separate languages the way English speakers normally think of the word "language". After all, if you speak Stokavian Croatian, Stokavian Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin, would you be justified is calling yourself quadrilingual? kwami (talk) 08:42, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Because SC is political language. "BCSM" does not exist. Please see the source [4]--Ex13 (talk) 09:13, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Croatian is also a "political language". So what? You're stuck with either SC or something silly like "BCSM". Please see your own source. kwami (talk) 09:16, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Maybe for you is political language. You never read croatian or serbian literature, or maybe never heard singl word of it--Ex13 (talk) 10:24, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

What we have here is a failure to communicate :) There are two distinct issues in the last revert - whether "Serbo-Croatian" should be put under "Western South Slavic", and whether the Sounds section should be merged into Serbo-Croatian article. Those are two very different things conflated into a single changeset...

Regarding the first part, the heading of that part of the infobox is language family, but that article doesn't seem to have clear-cut micromanagement advice. It delves definitively as deep into the tree as Slavic languages. That article in turn goes down to South Slavic, and then says that it "subdivides" into a "Western subgroup", where there are Slovenian, Croatian and others. So not including the term Serbo-Croatian in the family tree here does not seem like an abuse, merely a difference in opinions. Indeed, in the literary history, Croatian precedes Serbo-Croatian, so it depends if we are looking at the family tree from a standpoint where we trace the historical origins, or from a standpoint of a technical categorization.

Regarding the second part - that doesn't really make sense to me. While it's indisputable that the verb syntax is so exceedingly similar between Croatian and Serbo-Croatian that it's hard to justify separation, it's the sounds that aren't similar between all 'children' of Serbo-Croatian, particularly in the case of Croatian which includes non-Štokavian dialects. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 11:32, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

As for your last point, we have separate articles on non-Shtokavian dialects. The Croatian article deals almost exclusively with Stokavian. Thus the Shtokavian coverage could be profitably merged; anything left over would remain where it currently is. (I suppose we could have "Shtokavian grammar", but most English speakers would be clueless as to what that means, whereas everyone knows what Serbo-Croatian is.) Or we could merge all dialects: covering them all under SC would be no different than covering them all under Croatian. kwami (talk) 11:40, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, we could merge all Slavic languages into single article, so that English speakers understand. Also I suggest to merge all Scandinavian into one article. From time to time here comes users that somewhere reads about BCS or SC language, and then thinks that they know all about South Slavic languages claiming that they are NPOV, and others are POV pushers --Ex13 (talk) 12:11, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Please calm down. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 12:17, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, proponents of Serbo-Croatian like to use it as a cover term, and such usage by innocent bystanders is completely legit. But just like that, using Croatian as a cover term for (western) Shtokavian, Chakavian and Kajkavian is no less legit.

I'm not quite sure I would agree with your sentence in parenthesis - not everyone, especially not all English speakers, know what "Serbo-Croatian" is. There is no real reason to assume extensive post-1850s/pre-1990s education from all English speakers... and I'm being very specific and kind regarding the assumption of knowledge :) --Joy [shallot] (talk) 12:17, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Not everyone, especially not all English speakers, know what "Croatian" is. Most of them in fact think in terms of Yugoslavia and "Yugoslavian language". The thing is, we don't target average everyday ignoramus, but strive to be as extensive as possible. Serbo-Croatian is a valid genetic clade and must be mentioned. Who cares if some nationalist bigot's feelings get hurt. Facts are facts. -Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:46, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, Croatian is an adjective for Croatia which exists, and Yugoslavian is an adjective for Yugoslavia which does not exist in the relevant form for twenty years now, so it's hard to say that the latter would be more obvious to the unwashed masses compared to the former. The striving to be extensive does not need to be applied to matter of the language family in the infobox when the situation isn't clear - and it isn't, because the Croatian school of thought regarding language formation considers the attempted full merge with Serbian something of a deviation, meaning IOW they feel that the term Croatian language precedes Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian so the relationship between them cannot be expressed with the former below the latter. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 18:54, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't have a strong opinion how the four should be grouped: as Joy said, there's the catch that term "Croatian language" means both "Croatian standard language" and "set of 3 dialects spoken by Croats". Rather, there are two concurrent hierarchies: dialectal one (West South Slavic > {Shtokavian, Kajkavian, Chakavian, Slovenian}), and socio-linguistic one (Standard Serbo-Croatian(Shtokavian) > {Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian}). If forced to pick (you know the FpaS' "infoboxes must burn in hell" meme?), I would go with the latter (i.e. Kwami's) suggestion, but only just.

In any case, whichever decision is taken, it should be consistently applied to all 4 daughter language articles. As I said on Talk:Serbo-Croatian language#merge, phonology, grammar, morphology etc. should be merged under Serbo-Croatian grammar, with only a brief summary (if at all) mentioned in the 4 articles. No such user (talk) 12:29, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

It's not just a set of three dialects spoken by Croats; the standard Croatian (or, if you will, old standard Croato-Serbian, heh) is based on Shtokavian but it incorporates word forms from Chakavian and Kajkavian. If you just look at the Schleicher's fable (currently at Serbo-Croatian#Dialects) there are several examples of how the standard took some forms from one and some from another. And that is completely disregarding the historical side of the debate, where e.g. you have such extremes such as Vuk Karadžić thinking Kajkavian *is* Croatian (we have a picture here on Wikipedia where he claims that Croatian has no ć, but I can't find it right now). What you quote as a sociolinguistic hierarchy is then also inherently flawed. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 14:59, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Modern standard Croatian is exclusively based on Štokavian, and the words that have entered the literary standard from Čakavian and Kajkavian are statistically insignificant (some 20-30 lexical units at most, all of them phonologically "Štokavianized", almost all of them regionally confined). Kajkavian and Čakavian are spoken at rural areas, have no literary prestige whatsoever, haven't had literary tradition for centuries, are not taught in schools, and according to the mot optimistic estimates are bound to die out by the end of this century due to ever-increasing Štokavianization accelerated with the advent of modern mass media and the Internet. Schleicher's fable that you're referencing in no way proves your statement that the "standard took some forms from one, and some from anoher" - that's all inherited Slavic vocabulary. The standard of modern Croatian is direct descendant (with trivial modifications) of former Serbo-Croatian standard which was official in Croatia until ~20 years ago. Karadžić has nothing to do with this. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:59, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

I was going to complain generally about a self-referencing argument there, but then I read that again and it looks like you're saying Krleža's and Nazor's non-štokavian works are completely worthless? That sounds... strange to say the least :) In general, this is starting to look like a chicken-and-egg debate. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 18:54, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Short quote from "Povijest hrvatskoga književnoga jezika" (History of Croatian literary language), page 178, Milan Moguš, ISBN 953-167-014-5:

• Štoviše, za hrvatske je pisce bilo jasno i to da čakavska i kajkavska književna stilizacija nikada nisu prestale biti sastavnim dijelom jezika hrvatske književnosti. Unatoč željama hrvatskih vukovaca za štokavskom unifikacijom, čiji su nastupi postali jasni već šezdesetih godina 19. stoljeća, hrvatski je jezični standard ipak bio neprestano otvoren prema jezičnom bogatstvu i književnim stilizacijama naslijeđa.
• Moreover, for Croatian writers it were clear that čakavian and kajkavian literary stylization never ceased to be an integral part of the language of Croatian literature. Despite the wishes of the Croatian Vuk's followers for štokavian unification, whose performances have become clear already in the sixties of the 19th century, the Croatian language standard was always kept open to the richness of linguistic and literary heritage of stylization.

In other words, academic Moguš tells us clearly that Croatian followers of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić wanted to join Croatian to Serbian (or with Serbian) in some unified language. He does not mention political name of that unified language (Serbo-Croatian), but mentions that idea was inherently flawed, because Croatian language is not just štokavian, but blend of štokavian, čakavian and kajkavian. For examples please read the above book, there are too many of them to copy/paste here. I see Wikipedia as project that honors culture of any nation, and respects facts and sources. And sources are clear, Serbian and Croatian were never one language called Serbo-Croatian, they are close but different kindred south slavic languages. SpeedyGonsales (talk) 08:12, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

That's just bollocks. Modern literary Croatian is exclusively Neoštokavian (Eastern Herzegovinian), and there are countless credible sources to verify this. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:59, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

bollocks is not an argument. SpeedyGonsales (talk) 15:02, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Neither is the nonsense you cited. Just because some deranged extremist somewhere wrote that standard Croatian has "Čakavian and Kajkavian stylizations", it does't mean that it actually has (there is the reality, and there is the imagination). It hasn't.

I hope you realize you just managed to practically equate Milan Moguš to "some deranged extremist". That just doesn't make sense. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 20:31, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

I've read many (Serbo-)Croatian grammars (including comparative-historical), dictionaries, papers on the topic, and the only influences from those minor dialects in standard are in lexis, and very limited in scope. Citing from Robert Greenberg's Language an Identity on the Balkan, p. 121:

Thus, despite recent interventions, the Croatian standard has remained resistant to regional dialectisms. Such resistance is further seen in the use of the interrogative pronoun što vs. kaj. Hence, even though most natives of Zagreb use kaj for "what" rather than the standard form što, the form kaj is considered to be colloquial or dialectal. While Čakavian or Kajkavian dialectal forms are more likely to creep into standard Croatian than standard Serbian, the fact remains that very few dialectisms have actually entered Croatian from either of these two dialects. Moreover, distinctly Kajkavian and Čakavian phonological and morphological features are absent from the standard Croatian language. Even in the lexical domain, according to the Savjetnik, only a "certain number" ("određeni broj") of words from these dialects have been absorbed into the standard Croatian lexical stock, including: hrđa 'rust, corrosion', imetak 'property', klesar 'stone cutter, stone mason', krstitke 'baptismal party', kukac 'insect', ladanje 'farm/estate, country vacation', podrobno 'in detail', pospan 'sleepy, drowsy', prah 'powder, dust', rubac 'handkerchief, rublje 'laundry, linen', skladatelj 'composer', spužva 'sponge', tjedan 'week', tlak 'pressure' (Barić et al. 1999: 56). The authors of the Savjetnik confirmed that only in terms of lexicon can Croatian be simultaneously Štokavian, Čakavian, and Kajkavian, and that by contrast, in the realm of accentuation, the Croatian language is solely Neo-Štokavian in nature (ibid.: 70).

Clearly, these Čakavian and Kajkavian lexical items have become identified with the Croatian language, and would be considered non-native to Serbs, Bosniacs, and Montenegrins. Nonetheless, after the Ottoman invasions in the Balkans, the Štokavian dialects spread across the Croatian lands at the expense of the Kajkavian and Čakavian dialects (Katicic 1984: 264—5). Despite their pronouncements, the Croats have sacrificed these dialects in the name of unity for the Croatian Štokavian standard. Today the Čakavian dialect continues to decline, while the Kajkavian dialect has remained vibrant as it affects the urban vernacular of Zagreb (cf. Magner 1966). This urban vernacular, however, has had little influence over the standard language. Croat linguists since 1991 seem more open than ever to increasing the role of the peripheral dialects, although this openness has not been matched by a noticeable increase in the Kajkavian and Čakavian components of the new Croatian standard.

As I said, these "stylizations" are more theoretical than actual, in practice only lexical in form and very limited in scope (a few dozen words), lots of which have even found the was to the speech of Serbs and Bosniaks so even if they were "native Croatian" once, they're not anymore exclusively so. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 01:57, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

The situation seems rather like RP in English, which has influences from other parts of England, but remains essentially the dialect of London. You wouldn't call it a "blend" of various dialects because in contains some words and even pronunciations from them.

Effectively what we've got here is a dialect cluster, which might be simplified for sake of discussion into a chain s.t. like the following:

South Slavic	1. Resian 2. Standard Slovenian 3. Pannonian 4. Kajkavian 5. Chakavian  6. Shtokavian  a. Standard Croatian b. Bosnian c. Montenegrin d. Standard Serbian 7. Torlakian 8. Bulgarian 9. Macedonian 10. Greek Slavic

The common perception and the cladistics disagree. There is of course no sharp boundary between groups of these dialects, so there really is no Slovene, Croat, Serb, or Bulgarian language is a purely cladistic sense. 1–6 or 7 is considered West SS, and 7 or 8–10 East SS, but the continuum isn't actually bifurcated. Slovene is 1–3. Croatian is 4–6. Serbian is 6–7. Serbo-Croatian is 4–7. Bulgarian is 8–9 or 10. Macedonian is 9–10, unless you're Greek, in which case it's neither. So we can't speak of "Croatian" in a cladistic sense, yet we provide a cladistic classification for it. There's going to be some tension here. I would argue against listing Shtokavian as a superordinate category for either Croatian or Serbian, since not all dialects lumped into either conception are Shtokavian. But Serbo-Croatian is a superordinate category in that it includes the dialects of both, but is subordinate to Western SS as it excludes the dialects lumped under Slovenian. By removing SC from the classification, we're effectively saying that the languages in (6) are equidistant with the others, which they are not. kwami (talk) 19:17, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

The term Serbo-Croatian is necessery in two senses

1. As a cover term for the common dialectal basis of all 4 modern-day standards, all of which are direct continuations of a former Serbo-Croatian standard. These 4 "languages" are completely mutually intelligible, share 99% of grammar (exactly the same phonology, inflection, minor differences only in syntax), and are generally viewed as 4 different varieties of one underlying language, which is the reason why they're regularly taught "combined" in language courses. You cannot e.g learn "Croatian", and not simultaneously have the same proficiency in "Serbian" or "Bosnian" (or in any other combination thereof). All 4 modern-day standards have had a common codified standard for some 140 years (which is much longer than 20 years in "separation"), and have had common linguistic prehistory of Neoštokavian dialect that spans centuries. It makes a lot of sense to group them together.
2. There is another issue which nobody mentioned. Citing from Matasović's comparative-historical grammar of Croatian, p.64:

   Nema nikakve dvojbe da postoji potreba za terminom koji bi izrazio činjenicu da su upravo čakavski, štokavski i kajkavski dijalekti, osobito tijekom burnoga razdoblja seobi izazvanih turskim osvajanjima u 15. i 16. st., intenzivno utjecali jedni na druge, što je dovelo i do nastanka miješanih dijalekata, osobito na štokavskom području.

   There is no doubt that one needs a term to express the fact that Čakavian, Štokavian ad Kajkavan dialects, especially during the tumultuous period of migrations caused by Ottoman conquest in the 15th and 16th centuries, have made intensive influence on one another, which gave rise to "mixed" dialects, especially on Štokvian area.

In other words, the Čakavian and Kajkavian dialects have historically been profoundly influenced by the Štokavian expansion during the period of Ottoman-caused migrations (note that there were never reverse trends: it was always Štokavian speech that has spread at the expense of other two), and that form of deep mutual influence can also be conveniently covered by the term Serbo-Croatian. Modern Čakavian, Kajkavian and Štokavian are deeply interconnected and it makes sense to group them all together under one umbrella term. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 02:16, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm with you here regarding the view that scientific classification is a good and necessary idea, but the problem is that "Serbo-Croatian" (srpskohrvatski) as a term has been tainted by the simple fact that it is not just a term that originates from a scientific standpoint, it is also a term that was used to refer to one particular old standard language, and one that happened to be eating away at its sibling Croato-Serbian (hrvatskosrpski) to the point where the bulk of the Croatian linguistic community collectively complained about it in the 1967 Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language. Let alone everything else that happened afterwards. With that kind of a baggage, you are just plain being silly if you expect that everyone else will ignore this reality just because the idea of a grouping has a scientific basis. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 19:10, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Ivan Štambuk cites Matasović's grammar, but Štambuk has filtered the parts that he dislikes. Ivan Štambuk pushes his personal attitudes (WP:POV) at the expense of scientifically based encyclopedic content and Ivan Štambuk pushes his original work (WP:OR) ("that form of deep mutual influence can also be conveniently covered by the term Serbo-Croatian").
Linguist Ranko Matasović said something completely different. Matasović explicitly said that Vijenac nr. 383/2008 Serbo-Croatian language was never realized, because it never existed. He explicitly said that Serbo-Croatian was the project in the heads of group of linguists and politicians.
"...srpsko-hrvatski koji se godinama učio u školama bivše Jugoslavije... je ... bio projekt u glavama skupine lingvista i mnogih političara. Kao standardni jezik srpsko-hrvatski nikada nije postojao. Bio je projekt koji nikada nije ostvaren. Kao jezik promatran iz kuta genetske lingvistike on nikad nije postojao zbog razloga o kojima govorim u knjizi."
Misrepresenting the data is kind of disrupting of Wikipedia WP:DISRUPT. Kubura (talk) 03:09, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian

This artificial construct has never existed; I know it's hard for some people to swallow this, but it isn't my fault. The Croatian people, linguists, everyone... has the same aversion to this term as blacks or African-Americans have towards the term "Nigger". So, be kind to avoid this terminology since it leads only to useless edit wars. http://www.matica.hr/Vijenac/vijenac383.nsf/AllWebDocs/Srpsko_hrvatski_nikada_nije_ostvaren__jer_nije_postojao

http://www.matica.hr/Vijenac/vijenac380.nsf/AllWebDocs/Hrvatski_iz_perspektive_indoeuropskoga

http://www.matica.hr/MH_Periodika/vijenac/1999/135/tekstovi/08.htm

http://www.matica.hr/MH_Periodika/vijenac/1999/138/tekstovi/06.htm

http://www.ihjj.hr/oHrJeziku-povijest-1.html

Mir Harven (talk) 13:40, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

It is not exacly a secret that a number of Croats, linguists included, have resentment towards the term "Serbo-Croatian", so your links are not a revelation. Your statement that "The Croatian people, linguists, everyone... has the same aversion to this term ... as the term "Nigger"" is a clear exaggeration though. If that were true, why would the vast majority of English-speaking linguists continue to use the term to refer to the languages as collectivity? Google Scholar returns 9,380 hits for "Serbo-Croatian" after 1991 [5] -- why is it so if it is so offensive? The world is usually sensitive if a term hurts one's feelings and would eventually discontinue using it. Even (more serious part of) those does not deny that Croatian and Serbian are one genetic language (i.e. form a dialectal continuum), although they refer to it as Central South Slavic diasystem (whose coinage it was, btw?). Still, no shorter and more neutral term than "Serbo-Croatian" has been established in the English-speaking world, so we continue to use it, for lack of a better one. No such user (talk) 13:58, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

There are no world-class English-language experts re Croatian (or Serbian, for that matter) language. They just copy-paste old & dated textbooks which are a complete mess & suggest that there had been (or has been) a Serbo-Croatian language. Well- no such thing. This was a cover term such as Hindi-Urdu or Czechoslovakian, without linguistic content. Of course that there are contemporary experts re Croatian language, for instance:

Artur Bagdasarov: http://www.amazon.com/Khorvatskii-literaturnyi-poloviny-uchebnoe-posobie/dp/5747403060/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1272033908&sr=1-3-fkmr1

Leopold Auburger: http://www.amazon.com/Die-kroatische-Sprache-Serbokroatismus-German/dp/3873360098/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272033959&sr=1-7

Barbara Oczkowa: http://openlibrary.org/b/OL22678754M/Chorwaci_i_ich_je%CC%A8zyk

then Ljudmila Vasiljeva, Joanna Rapacka, ...

The fact that some institutions (ISO, the Hague tribunal etc.) still use a dated "Serbo-Croatian" (or HBS, BCS, whatever) label is not sufficient enough for reintroduction of the despised and devalued term. Mir Harven (talk) 14:53, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Please provide proper citations of those. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

How about Wayles Browne, Frederik Kortlandt, Vladimir Dybo, Kenneth Naylor Robert Greenberg? All of them published numerous papers on Serbo-Croatian language, its historical development, some also of sociolinguistics aspects of its modern-day standards [6]. Your attempt to discredit everyone except "native experts" and their cronies on the payroll of HAZU is nothing short of laughable. American, Dutch and German Slavic circles have a long history of studying Serbo-Croatian, and their opinions deserve to be taken into account. NPOV principle requires that. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:11, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Please provide proper citations of those. That last link has "Language and Identity in the Balkans - Serbo-Croatian and Its Disintegration" by Robert D. Greenberg which is listed on books.google.com - that should be easy enough to cite. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I don't quite see what you're arguing against. As for my part, I don't argue that Serbian and Croatian are the one same standard language, and I assert that differences in standardization (and underlying vernaculars as well) certainly exist. On the other hand, I assert that they share the dialectal base (Neoshtokavian), as well as large part of the dictionary, morphology etc. Thus, being based on the same dialect and sharing most of the dictionary (especially basic one, large differences in scientific vocabulary notwithstanding), they're completely mutually intelligible, and thus form one diasystem, or, in layman's terms (what Kwami calls "everyday English meaning of the workd"), a language. That diasystem/language has several names, the most common one being "Serbo-Croatian". On the other hand, I can agree that as a standard language, "Serbo-Croatian" does not exist (I would say, "anymore", you would likely say "never"). No such user (talk) 15:25, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

There is absolutely no reason to try to find a cover term which would encompass the dialects of Serbian and Croatian, nor the pseudo-entity that would suggest that Croatian and Serbian are, to some extent, "branches" of this alleged entity which doesn't (and didn't) exist. The term "Serbo-Croatian" is useless in both ways it is still sometimes used: a) as a standard language, it never existed, b) as a group of dialects, it's ordinary usage distorts language facts and history since Croatian is not influenced by Torlakian and Eastern Štokavian dialects, nor is Serbian influenced by Čakavian od Western Štokavian dialects. Moreover, similar situations (Bulgarian and Macedonian, Danish and Norwegian rijksmal, Urdu and Hindi) don't have any superimposed labels. Therefore, revert. Let Serbo-Croatian go where it belongs, a history's dustbin. Mir Harven (talk) 20:40, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

There is a good reason, because all those 4 modern-day standards have 99% identical grammar and vocabulary, and are taught as one language on 99% of world's universities. Up until 20 years ago they have had common grammars, dictionaries and orthographies. The rest of your analogies are inapplicable logical fallacies. The common term is still heavily used (either as Serb-Croatian, or BCS(M)), and there is no reason to ignore it just because a bunch of Croatia nationalist-linguists disagrees. In English-speaking literature it's used, so we must mention it, clarify it, and use where it's appropriate. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:17, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, there is a reason to find a cover term. The branch exist, and we need a label for it. We follow WP:Common. You've misrepresented things here: The cover term for Bulg. & Mac. is Eastern South Slavic. They, and the Skandinavian tongues, are at least based on different dialects, even if they're extremely close. SCBM are all based on the same dialect, at least as official langs, which sets them apart as a group from Slovenian. We need a term for that group. This is, after all, cladistics. Standard SC existed because the govt said it did, but that's irrelevant to this article: we're not talking about artificial standards in a genealogy. Urdu and Standard Hindi are indeed a parallel case: identical languages apart from their standardized forms, both Khariboli dialect, differing in script and only because of religious differences between their speakers. But if those articles have been reverted to some nonsense about Standard Hindi Khariboli dialect and Urdu Khariboli dialect being distinct branches of Indic, then that needs to be corrected, not used as an argument for similar nonsense here. SC is part of the classification of these languages. IMO it's the only viable English term, though of course that's a legitimate matter for debate. For now, back it goes: the branch remains regardless of what we call it, and you can discuss what to call it here. And BTW, deletion of requests for discussion is considered vandalism. kwami (talk) 22:39, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

No, there is no reason for a cover term except Western South Slavic. Genetically, there had never been anything like "Serbo-Croatian"; typologically, the situation is the same. Only as a socio-political construct did philologists and part of the general public didi believe that there was a standard Serbo-Croatian language. So, where we are ?

Genetic linguistics: Western and Eastern South Slavic, no Serbo-Croatian (or any other term that would encompass Čakavian + Kajkavian + Štokavian + Torlakian dialects)

Typological linguistics or linguistic typology: Western and Eastern South Slavic, no Serbo-Croatian (as above)

Standard languages classification: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, no Serbo-Croatian, since all these standard languages are not, nor have ever been "branches" or "variants" or "versions" of one standard language- be it called Serbo- Croatian, Illyrian, Bosnian, Slovin, Dalmatian or whatever. For reasons beyond this little chat, you're trying to resurrect an ideological corpse. Mir Harven (talk) 10:06, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Nope, genetically, standard Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin are one and the same subdialect of Štokavian - Neoštokavian. It's unimaginable how one dialect (moreover, one subdialect of that same dialect) can simultaneously be "different languages". Čakavian, Kajkavian and Torlakian and different languages altogether, and are only called "dialects" because they're not codified in some universal literary form (in a common, layman sense of the word dialect). Geneticaly, modern standard B/C/S/M do represent a genetic clade and did have common ancestral form (Proto-Štokavian, plus Neoštokavan trais that developed to the 14th-15th century). Since they shared a common ancestor, that fact must be mentioned. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:25, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Again, wrong. 1) Croatian (standard) does not have a dialectal basis (see below- the same with German). 2) here we again see the confusion of the interpretative levels: dialectology and standardology are hopelessly confused. Croatian in the 15th, 16th, 17th,..has been always a mixture, or, in a more nuanced way, from the 16th century on, the standardization of Croatian, vide dialects- generally- revolved around Štokavian-jekavian with strong Čakavian and Kajkavian ingredients. The essence of Croatian standard is not the imaginary Štokavian (for the major part of Štokavian dialects material, from phonology to syntax, did not enter into standard Croatian), but the interraction between its speakers, which can be traced from the language of Vatican Croatian Prayer Book, Bartol Kašić's works to Radoslav Katičić's syntax and treatises on Croatian language standardization. Mir Harven (talk) 10:54, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Citing mr. Ranko Matasović, the pre-eminent Croatian academician and authority on the lingistic (pre)history of (Serbo-)Croatian, from his book published 2 years, The Comparative Grammar of Croatian Language, page 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).

in translation:

Standard Croatian language, the official language of the Republic of Croatia, has developed only on the basis of a singular dalect spoken by Croats, a dialect which has also been chosen as a basis for standardization, in other historical circumstances, by other peoples (Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrin).

Lisac in his 2003 book on Štokavian dialects says the same thing. There's really no need to lie: standard Croatia is pure Neoštokavian. There are no "strong Čakavian and Kajkavian ingredient", that's just absurd. 15th century Dubrovnikans have absolutely nothing in common with the linguistic predecessors of modern-day self-styled Croats in e.g. Slavonia or Istria. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:34, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, no, the world isn't really usually sensitive if a term hurts one's feelings. A few months ago some members of the European Parliament proposed to the body that they don't list Croatian as one of the (future) languages of the EU, but instead Serbo-Croatian. This was rejected by the majority in the EP, but not before the Croatian press had a round of general consternation - all local press sources led with that title: Jutarnji, Večernji, Slobodna, Novi list, 24sata, HRT, Nova, ... if practically all mainstream media outlets jump on the story, you can be sure that the topic is something that is sure to rile up the public. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 15:11, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't take too seriously an initiative of "some members of the European parliament". They've been known to propose much larger bull than that. On the other hand, I can understand the desire of European regulators to reduce overall translation costs in the future. Surely the Croatian public is sensitive to the matter which is chiefly political and loaded; but in the case at hand, I think we're trying to base the editorial decision more on scientific (and less on political) grounds. No such user (talk) 15:25, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Croatia also donated tens of thousands of pages of legal documentation to Serbia (and later Bosnia and Montenegro were also mentioned IIRC) [7], which was translated from English, in order to save millions of euros of expenses to other ex-Yu states were Serbo-Croatian is also spoken. In order words, the language of money speaks much louder than the headlines of cheap tabloids which have a stake in promoting nationalistic hysteria. I'm pretty sure that EU will recognize only one translation language in order to reduce costs which already measure in more than billion euros a year, and which rise sharply (^2, from and to every language) with the addition of new member states. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:37, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

You just equated the entirety of the Croatian mainstream press with "cheap tabloids with have a stake in promoting nationalistic hysteria". Please, please, stop using that much hyperbole.

Besides, the money argument is pretty hollow - the language of money currently speaks quite loudly through the simple fact that the entirety of the native communication in this country is done in Croatian, and not in any other sibling form, meaning someone actually already goes out of their way and pays to have everything that they might conceivably borrow from somewhere else. Indeed that's exactly what happened with the EU documents - the Croatians did not save a single dime on those expenses. So they insist on their own language and are putting their money where their mouth is. Whether something different will happen in the future that will deviate from the current standard, we can't tell, it would be conjecture. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 20:43, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

I am bemused as to why we are discussing this here. If people seriously contend that Serbo-Croatian is not a genuine language or language group then they should go to Serbo-Croatian language and put that article up for AfD, supplying a convincing rationale for deletion, rather than try to unlink it from some specific articles. It is either a valid subject or it isn't. It needs to be kept or purged from Wikipedia as a whole. I can't claim any knowledge of the subject myself but my impression is that Serbo-Croatian language is a long standing article that appears reasonably well referenced and which exists in vast numbers of the other Wikipedia languages. It certainly doesn't look like a hoax, a misunderstanding or a fringe viewpoint. The article acknowledges that it is a sensitive subject and seems to do a good job of explaining this in a neutral way. In short, while I have an open mind, it will take a lot more than hyperbolic assertions to persuade me that it is bogus. While it may be true that outdated material still exists and circulates on this subject, I find the above assertion that no English speaking linguist has any current knowledge of the subject very hard to swallow. That sounds like a rather lame excuse for not having adequate sources to back the claim. --DanielRigal (talk) 23:11, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

1) So-called "Serbo-Croatian" is the political project. Not the true language. The project was kept alive by the force of the weapons. Any attempt of promoting of independent Croatian was violently persecuted.
Since "Serbo-Croatian" was a project, it has it's own article, just like any other project, like Frankenstein.
2) Croatian language hasn't appeared with the "dissolution of Serbo-Croatian". Croatian existed centuries before that project.
3) Standard Croatian is based on 3 dialects. It was standardized in end of 15th c., with the entry of Dubrovnikan literature (Stjepan Babić: Hrvatski jučer i danas, Školske novine, Zagreb, 1995, p. 250), in which at that time, Dubrovnik dialect of Shtokavian was in use. Croatian linguists made bunch of grammars and dictionaries since Bartol Kašić and 1604. Since then, Croatian developed evolutively, with no big breaks and turning points.
4) Standard Serbian is based on one dialect. It was standardized in 19th century with Vuk Karadžić. It was revolutionary change, compared to Serbian Church Slavonic. Karadžić used a lot solutions that were long ago in active use among Croats.
5) There's no need for cover term. "South Slavic languages" is enough, since Croats are South Slavs. Serbo-Croatian is very bad and insultive term. Croats aren't Serbs.
6) Arguments about the Slavists that use the term "Serbo-Croatian". Pre-20th century "science" also used the term "nigger" and "proved" that Slavs and non-whites are Untermensch. Don't use ideologized literature. Kubura (talk) 03:00, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

1) Irrelevant. You're arguing a strawman, just like Mir above. I can accept the thesis that Serbo-Croatian standard language was a political project, but this is not at all what the discussion is about. This discussion is about how the cover term for Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin should be termed and phrased. Please read carefully Mijo Lončarić, Odnosi među standardnim jezicima which is a fine overview of the debate. Although the autor argues that standard Serbo-Croatian has not existed, he (as well as other Croatian linguists, including Brozovic, who is on the far end of the "independists" spectrum) still states in the Conclusion that "Crnogorski, bošnjački, hrvatski, i srpski čine svojevrstan dijasistem književnih jezika".

Brozović's invention of the "Central South Slavic diasystem" is: a) not generally accepted either among Croatian linguists, or among world slavicists. b) the very intention of this- botched, it seems- invention is to get rid of the detested "Serbo-Croatian " label, the very one you're trying to reimpose. So, while Brozović's CSS remains a blunder, your insistence on "Serbo-Croatian" is much more. Mir Harven (talk) 10:39, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

2) Standard Croatian is not based on 3 dialects. It is based on Shtokavian dialect, just like Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin (in its craddle). There exist rich Croatian literature in Kajkavian and Chakavian, but very little of it has made it to the standard Croatian, as defined in grammars and textbooks. Your statement that "It was standardized in end of 15th century" is ridiculous: no language has been standardized at that time (except maybe Latin, although a better term would be petrified). See definition of standard language.

3), 4) True but irrelevant for the issue at hand.

Wrong. Standard Croatian does not have a dialectal basis, much as standard German doesn't. Standard Croatian is stylized (not based) around Western Štokavian-Čakavian mixture of the Dubrovnik language literature, then refurbished in the Illyrian period of Gaj, Kukuljević and Mažuranić (see the works of Branka Tafra and Josip Vončina that explicitly deny that Croatian in the 19th century has had any dialectal basis- just a stylization around Neoštokavian-jekavian nucleus which cannot be found, as a spoken idiom, anywhere). With the advent of Croatian Vukovians (Maretić, Budmani, Iveković,..) Štokavian purism appeared, but it eventually sizzled. This fact can be illustrated on all levels, from accentuation to syntax: for instance, standard Croatian uses prefix "protu" (anti)- protupitanje, protumjera,.., which is Kajkavian, as different from "protiv", which is Štokavian- protivpitanje, protivm(j)era,... This "Štokavian" fixation is both irrational & untrue: Croatian is not "based" on Štokavian (as Hindi and Urdu are based one one dialect, and no one tries to impose a Hindi-Urdu cover term (now- there have been similar designations before, but have largely fell out of use); the profile of this standard language is much more determined by its cultural stylization than by its dialectal ingredients- be they Štokavian, Kajkavian or Čakavian. A language is irreducible to a dialect, or to the set of dialects, as much as genetics or chemistry are not reducible to physics. Mir Harven (talk) 10:39, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

As I said above, that's just pure BS that Croatian "has no dialectal basis". It has - it's Neoštokavian, and the criteria satisfying that classification can be found in specialized handbooks such as Matasović's comparative-historical grammar, or Lisac's book on Štokavian dialects (all printed in post-2000, both by prominent Croatian authors). What Mir Harven writes above is pure nonsense (see what nationalism does to your mind? It's like drugs). Interestingly, The Croatian Wikipedia claimed the Neoštokavian basis for standard Croatian all the way until August 16th 2009 [8] when an IP (almost 100% Mir Harven himself) changed it to "It has no dialectal basis". Ridiculous. This just furthermore proves that we're dealing with a delicate case of history fabrication, were facts are twisted in order to suit one's imagination. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 01:23, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Hm, that sveznadar.hr link is broken right now (I get DNS SERVFAIL). Can you provide a proper citation? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:33, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

5) Says you that there's no need for the cover term. [9] Linguists across the world disagree, because they need a single term to describe the common features in all encompassed languages.

Please extract some relevant subset of these and provide them as citations in the relevant articles. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:33, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

6) Again strawman. The term "Serbo-Croatian" is not a relict of 19th century, but is actively used in 21st century. Your (and not only yours) dislike of it is duly noted, but that's the most common term for the diasystem. The most popular other name is BCS(M), and Central South Slavic diasystem lagging behind. However, we report what sources do, and sources prevalently call this diasystem "Serbo-Croatian". No such user (talk) 07:43, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Okay, it seems clear that the opposition to the term SC is due to political connotations it has in Croatian, and has nothing to do with how the term is used in English, which is simply as a Dachsprache for BCSM. I'm restoring what most of us here agree is the more WP:NPOV version of the article per WP:English. kwami (talk) 08:20, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

should we split the SC article?

I'd link to throw an idea into the discussion. AFAICT, the opposition to describing Croatian as a form of Serbo-Croatian, which it clearly is in English, is primarily due to the political and historical connotations the word has in Croatian. So, what if we were to split the SC article? Part of the material would be moved to "Standard Serbo-Croatian". This would be about SC in the Croatian conception: the erstwhile (some would say abortive) standard language of Yugoslavia. The reduced "Serbo-Croatian language" would then be about SC in the common English conception: the common vernacular of Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbian. Hatnotes would redirect the reader who's at the wrong article. Would having two clearly delineated articles, one about Yugoslav language politics and the other about what Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, and Montenegrins all call "our language", taught as "Serbo-Croatian" at the US Foreign Service Institute and Defense Language Institute. Do you think this would resolve the assumption that the English term SC is somehow being used to deny the legitimacy of Croatian as a national standard?

That is,

srpskohrvatski → "Standard Serbo-Croatian"

naš jezik → "Serbo-Croatian language"

I think this might be a good idea even without Croatian opposition to the term, as AFAICT the article started out as the Yugoslav standard, and was coopted for the common vernacular, but was never really cleaned up properly, so it's still a bit schizophrenic. kwami (talk) 22:23, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, I see that US language recognition policy is changing, so that "Serbo-Croatian" will have eventually disappeared. But, let's try to get some reasonable results.

As far as dialects are concerned, and as far as language standardization has gone, Croatian is a three dialcts tongue, with Western Štokavian being the nucleus for standardization. Croats speak Kajkavian, Čakavian and Štokavian dialects (they don't speak, let's call it, Eastern Štokavian). Dalibor Brozović has coined the term Central South Slavic Diasystem (CSSD) for this dialectal continuum (which is in a sense arbitrary, as is the distinction between Western and Eastern South Slavic, due to existence of the Torlak). So, for Croatian language, acceptable "umbrella" term would be CSSD because they speak Kajkavian, Čakavian and Štokavian dialects. CSSD has been adopted by the majority of Bosniak and Montenegrin linguists, but not the Serbian philologists.

I cannot speak for Bosnian, Serbian or Montenegrin, but these languages have one "umbrella" term dialectology-wise: Štokavian (although different Štokavian dialects have played different roles during respective language policy and planning).

So, as it is, for Croatian is acceptable CSSD (some Croatian linguists use it, some not); for Bosnian- CSSD (some use it, some not) or Štokavian; for Montenegrin CSSD (some use it, some not) or Štokavian; for Serbian - Štokavian, since Serbian linguists explicitly deny the existence of CSSD.

Serbo-Croatian is obsolete & "politically incorrect" (US textbooks are not of much help here- the people involved in language debates, like Norwegian linguist Svein Monnesland, use CSSD instead) and other terms (naš, naški) are clearly archaic. Mir Harven (talk) 11:09, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

CSSD is an obscure term used by no one that moreover has zero linguistic justification. The only reason why Brozović invented it is in an attempt to replace the term Serbo-Croatian, which has and still is serving well for that purpose. It has only been adopted by a few local sympathizers, and has no usage in foreign-language sources. And lets just cut this "political correctness" nonsense once and for all: the only reason why the term Serbo-Croatian is considered "politically incorrect" is because the so-called different languages are implicitly defined as departing from it. The rest of the world, in particular Slavist linguistic circles worldwide, have no illusions that we're dealing with trivially-differing national varieties of one and only language that has been called Serbo-Croatian for centuries. Some have adopted alternative name such as the abbreviation BCS(M) but the meaning is the same. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 03:20, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't like the idea. I acknowledge that the term "Serbo-Croatian" is a fuzzy concept (or at least, means different things in different contexts), but splitting it would border on WP:NOR. Well, every language with a standard variety and multiple dialects would ostensibly suffer from similiar problem, though with Serbo-Croatian it is exacerbated: the term "Foo language" refers to the "standard language of Foo" and "set of dialects in the area inhabited by Fooians"; however, the term in real life does encompass all those meanings, and context defines which one (if it is relevant at all). Further, the concepts usually overlap to a great extent: typically, dialects and varieties use 90+% of phonology, syntax and morphology of the standard language. In normal circumstances, that does not prevent us from writing one article about the language: we except that the reader is familiar with basic linguistics, and for every language we usually describe socio-linguistic circumstances, standard phonology and grammar, and make an overview of major dialects and varieties with their basic features. Splitting an article for political reasons is seldom a good idea (even if made with best intentions). No such user (talk) 06:51, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

There are other examples: Mandarin Chinese vs Standard Mandarin, Standard Hindi, Received Pronunciation, Arabic language vs Modern Standard Arabic, German language vs Standard German, French language vs Standard French, etc. — kwami (talk) 07:09, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

That's one way of looking at it - a new split of linguistic data for political reasons. But you're not looking at it from the perspective that we already have more than five articles with completely political names and random amounts of linguistics, plus flamewars at random intervals. Surely the current compromise between politics and linguistics is decidedly on the side of politics -- if not politicking. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 07:49, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

AFAIR the reference used for the language family is a note in Ethnologue that calls it "macrolanguage". If there is scientific merit in that term, use that. And then have Serbo-Croatian language and be a simple disambiguation page between Serbo-Croatian macrolanguage which explains linguistics and Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian language which explains 1918-1990 - with the long title because there were two standards there in fact, not just one that you can easily term Standard Serbo-Croatian (but that can be an incoming redirect). This would seem to be fairly accurate. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 07:45, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

"macrolanguage" is a classificatory term used by Ethnologue and has no usage in general linguistics. We cannot create articles based on it because it doesn't mean anything other other Ethnologue defined it to mean. The term Croato-Serbian has almost 0 usage in English and cannot be used in article name per naming policy. There were no "two standards", there was one standard in two regional varieties: Eastern and Western, and many would argue that that is still the case. It's absurd to make a cut in 1990s just because some states proclaimed independence back then: not only did the official language of Serbia&Montenegro remained Serbo-Croatian (until 1998 IIRC), but in practical terms nothing has really changed in then-seceded Croatia: people didn't start speaking or writing "different language", and it took a decade to get purists enforcing even the minor changes in Croatian standard. What should be done is to further unify the articles, because all 5 of them contain whole paragraphs of duplicate information, each from a particular nationalist point of view. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 03:33, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

You seem to have a real knack for hyperbole. a) if the macrolanguage used by Ethnologue is completely made up, why are we using that as a reference in the family tree?! b) The difference between ekavski and ijekavski always was and continues to be completely real (along with some smaller recognizable differences), and documented in all relevant documentation. You may not like it, you may want to downplay it, you may treat all those speakers who use a single one as prissy whiners, but none of that changes the fact that the variation in standards nevertheless exists. At this point, after several rounds of argument, I'm equally annoyed with having to argue on this level with you as I am annoyed by the exaggerated nationalist side. Take that as you will. :| --Joy [shallot] (talk) 07:37, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

We use it as a references because Wikipedia apparently closely follows Ethnologue's language cladistics (which itself closely mirrors ISO 639 schemes). If you're not satisfied with it, other credible references could be found easily (e.g. this one). But the problem is not looking up references for some silly classifications, but what does that classification exactly mean. Does modern standard Croatian share linguistic (pre)history (a set of sound changes and common innovations in grammar and lexis) with modern standard Bosnian/Serbian/Montenegrin ? It undoubtedly does, since they're all based on the same dialect - Neoštokavian. Do they form a genetic node in that way? They do. Other aspect is of course if we consider language in the sense of "collection of dialects" (Croatian=Štokavian+ Kajkavian+Čakavian+Torlakian, Serbian=Štokavian+Torlakian), in which they do not form a genetic node, but neither does the whole South Slavic or Western Slavic area for that matter (which we surely do not want to remove). It's much more important to emphasize shared core of all 4 standards, in which the phrase "Croatian language" is primarily meant in English (and other) language and the details on real-world genetic subclassification can be dealt with elsewhere (it's partly already covered in South_Slavic_Languages#Linguistic_prehistory).

This is all fine, but none of it really makes the forcing of the term "Serbo-Croatian language" for the parent node any less problematic. This situation is even more subtle than Dano-Norwegian AFAICT, and yet you keep insisting on using the controversial term in its most objectionable meaning. Even if you consider it from the point of view of current Croatian as a renamed hrvatskosrpski - its historical parent can't be srpskohrvatski, when it was hrvatski or ilirski or štokavski or whatever. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 19:48, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

The term is not controversial in English language. Please try to understand that. It's still widely used with no problems whatsover. It is also used in German, Dutch and Russian Slavicist circles - all of which have long and influential traditions. All of the modern-day B/C/S/M standards have exactly the same parent in terms of genetic linguistics. A single dialect, a single subdialect of it moreover, that "evolved" from 10th-16th centuries, was finally standardized in the 19th century and is used in basically unmodified form ever since (new words aside). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:04, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Sigh. Just because you think that it's not controversial, even if that was true for a majority of readers, that simply doesn't mean the problem is solved and that the articles are going to be problem-free. I'm grasping for some pragmatism here, with ample evidence as to why, yet I get a similar amount of obstinance from both sides of the debate. WP:NPOV, anyone? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:11, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

The differences between Ijekavian and Ekavian variants are severely overhyped. From phonological viewpoint, it's almost a trivial difference (this semivowel [j] written as <ij>), comparable in severeness e.g. to that of English rhotics; in fact the phonetic differences between America and British English are 10 times larger in scope than any differences between B/C/S/M standards, and yet no one treats them as different languages. The same can be said to standard national varieties of German, Spanish, Portuguese etc.).

I'm sure you've heard the short answer to this argument before - so what? Why is this so horribly unacceptable that you can't let it go and have to complain about it incessantly? Are you also going to go rail on the Chinese for doing the opposite to the extreme? :) --Joy [shallot] (talk) 19:48, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

It's important to emphasize the only objection on the terminological classification stems not from real-world linguistically-backed justification, but from irrational prejudices rooted in nationalist propaganda. Readers should not be deliberately miguided to think that people in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Podgorica and Belgrade speak 4 different languages, or have significant difficulties in understanding each other. I don't really see how Chinese are "doing the opposite" or how is whatever they're doing relevant or analogically applicable here - they have one standard Mandarin based on upper-class Beijing speech with some historical admixtures, and the common people use vast number of regional dialects with no literary tradition or ideological tendencies to diverge. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:11, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Furthermore, they are inextricably interconnected: in many words which exhibit Ijekavian/Ekavia pairing in their lemma form (infinitive verbal stem, adjectival positive and nominal nominative) there is in fact collision throughout much of the inflection. Consider e.g. verbs doprijeti/dopreti (both having the same present tense: doprem, dopreš, dopre....), nouns brijeg/breg (bot having the same plural forms bregovi, bregova, bregovima...), adjectives vrijedan/vredan(both having the same comparative and superlative forms, and their inflection in 7 cases 3 genders and 2 numbers: vredniji...). Ijekavian/Ekavian reflex is not a separatory isogloss!!! It is only drawn in cases where the "Ijekavian" form doesn't have the yat reflex /e/ (which it can have in many phonetic environments) where "Ekavian" form has it. And, since Ijekavian is shared by all four national standards (you didn't forget Bosnian Serbs, did you? :), it cannot serve as a "difference" in the first place.

I'm glad that you're annoyed because it shows that I'm right and that you all are running out of arguments... --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 12:09, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

The simple observable difference is that Croatian standard accepts one variant, while the Serbian standard accepts both. SCNR. :) --Joy [shallot] (talk) 19:48, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Which makes Croatian standard a subset of Serbian standard in that respect, both of which are subsets of Serbo-Croatian superstructure. It's not a strict separatory difference in terms of "we use only this, and you use only that". Which is actually quite ironic when you think about it, since most nationalists on either side would just love to switch roles: Croats having "only their" dialect as a literary (ekavski), and Serbs having a uniform standard. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:57, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

I'd rather not cite Ethnologue for anything, unless we absolutely must (as in ISO-xxx codes); it's mostly a tertiary source with inconsistent, often loose, fact-checking. If you can supply other decent sources, please do. However, as Joy (and Kwami) note, there is a hypocrisy (note that it's not directed towards you personally) if the same source is good for supporting statement A but bad for supporting statement B, where the former is liked and the latter disliked.

"I'm glad that you're annoyed because it shows that I'm right and that you all are running out of arguments..." that wasn't exactly a nice thing to say, and shows your WP:BATTLEGROUND mentality; being right does not entitle you to be a dick. No such user (talk) 13:00, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

As I said other sources can be easily found, like Schenker above (which I did add a few months ago and which was also removed). Or the newest glottochronological trees by Starostin, Blažek and others (all of them Slavists). Ethnologue should be used when its supports the truth and dumped otherwise. It's absurd to expect from one such source compiled by hundreds of individuals (including a machine) to be 100% accurate. Just because it's false in some points, it doesn't mean that it's false in all the others. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 17:04, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

OTOH Occam's razor says you just like being a jerk. :p --Joy [shallot] (talk) 19:48, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

To make things clear - this kind of a change would not reduce the number of articles a lot, but it would make it possible to merge strictly linguistic information into one set of articles, and then the other language pages would be able to point (link) to that for common information. If it proves successful, maybe parts of Differences between standard Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian could then also be moved into their own articles and sections - maybe. The random vandalism or flaming with those references would not be completely eliminated, but it would be reduced and could be made manageable if we had a modicum of consensus among registered editors, who could then maintain a level of civility in the discussions regarding subtle content disputes, set semi-protections in all the right places, etc. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 07:57, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

I would support the opposite - creating article such as [[Sociolinguistic aspects of Serbo-Croatian]] that would deal with all the historical and actual political aspects of SC, including the naming issue(s), as well as modern-day standards. Main language article should deal with linguistic information (because it's, you know, linguistic topic :) There should be separate articles for history, dialectal classification (treatment as a 'macrolanguage'), sociolinguistic aspects, differences among standards etc. Each of those would get their paragraph but would not dominate the main article (as they do now) at the expense of central topic. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 03:50, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

I also think that we shouldn't fuss with "macrolanguage" concept, and should stick to more accepted approaches. I agree with your proposal that, if we decide to split Serbo-Croatian (which I'm not convinced is a good idea yet), the other article should be called "Sociolinguistic aspects of Serbo-Croatian" or like. No such user (talk) 13:00, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

standard Serbo-Croatian, Serbo-Croatian and naš jezik mean exactly the same thing - literary form of Neoštokavian dialect that has been in use since the mid-19th century. Modern standards are carbon copies of the former Yugoslav standard with trivial differences that are more theoretical than practical in nature (i.e. imagined by nationalist standardizers, but rarely or no one actually uses them, and are more than often ridiculed by common people who generally hold disgust towards academic parasites sucking taxpayer's money like sponges). Parallels with MSA, Standard Mandarin and German are inapplicable, because the SC area today is almost completely Štokavianized and other dialects are spoken at outskirts in rural areas by uneducated people (schools and all the media use only the standard idiom). This is not just one idealized idiom that people are schooled in to use for real-world communication, it is the idiom, and the rest are just insignificant anomalies. Serbo-Croatian linguistic area is relatively small and compact, and the trends in the last 100 years have shown that it's growing ever more uniform with rising urbanization. If something has to be split, it's the political discussions about the term and its usage across history. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 03:11, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Although naš jezik may mean the same thing as standard SC (I couldn't say!), plain SC does not. Okay, I don't know that's established English usage, but it's descriptive enough to be readily understood. "SC" is often taken to be BCSM as a whole, and therefore to include Chakavian, Kajkavian, and Torlakian as well as Shtokavian, whereas standard SC would be only the latter. If we want to distinguish the two senses of the word, so as not to imply that all of Croatian is part of the old Yugoslav standard, then I thought that a reasonable wording for doing so. SC would be the language from a cladistic/typological/descriptivist POV, whereas Standard SC would be the language from an official/prescriptivist POV. Though y'all are better informed than me as to the politics, and if you want Standard SC to be discussed in an article on sociolinguistics, that might work too.

Confusion, I'd say. Well, I'll reiterate: 1) pluricentric languages (German, English,..) are one stuff, similar standard Ausbau languages (Hindi & Urdu, BCSM) are yet another stuff- because their speakers consider either to belong (UK, US, ..) to one language community, or they do not consider this (BCSM, Hindi & Urdu). Chaucer and Milton belong to the language of UK and US English- Ivan Gundulić or Miroslav Krleža don't belong to "BSM", nor to the "Serbo-Croatian" language community- whatever this may mean. 2) there is no standard "Serbo-Croatian". All grammars and dictionaries until 1991. had been written either about Croatian or about Serbian. English language textbooks implied. They are, at best (or worst) a clumsy mixture of Croatian and Serbian- the same with "Hindi-Urdu" textbooks (do they exist ?). Mir Harven (talk) 21:42, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

Miroslav Krleža (widely considered the greatest Croatian writer of the 20th century) himself stated that Serbian and Croatian are one language in two names. Gundulić predates Croatian national consciousness for centuries. You won't find many (in fact, I doubt you'll find any) exclusive ethnic appellations in his works, especially the kind of that say that he speaks a language different than that of many Vlach visiting the Dubrovnik Republic (not part of the Croatia back then!) from hinterland. SC is a pluricentric language, see this paper by Snježana Kordić where that is meticulously elaborated. The problem is that most of the Croatian linguists on government payroll don't really have a clue what standardology is all about. This is all remnant of former Communist traditions which were ideologically-colored and significantly out of touch with linguistic currents in the free world. For them, "standard" is something that some obscure governmental body proscribes it to be, as opposed to what is actually used. Yes there are Hindi-Urdu textbooks (it's called Hindustani BTW), and most unis teach them together (two "languages" at the price of one - who'd wouldn't wanna extra skill on his CV for a tiny bit of an additional effort). Just as there are many Serb-Croatian grammars, dictionaries ad orthographies, published before and after 1991 (which is not such a relevant year anyway, because Serbo-Crotian still remained "official" language in the rest of Yugoslavia for several years to come after Croatia unilaterally decided to secede). Actually this whole non-linear "split" of Serbo-Croatian is a crown evidence that the whole problem is chiefly political in nature. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:50, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Can you provide the Kordić paper as a proper citation somewhere? I see it references a French book by one Paul-Louis Thomas - same issue. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:16, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Snježana Kordić is no authority on Croatian language; she's prominent only as a political linguist on a payroll of some proponents of the ideology of serbocroatism. She's been refuted for the umpteenth time (for instance by Croatian linguist Mario Grčević, here: http://www.ids-mannheim.de/prag/sprachvariation/fgvaria/Kordic1_PDF.pdf ), and also by her former mentor Ivo Pranjković, but the most effectively in philologist Zvonko Pandžić's ca. 20 pages article, published after long delay in "Književna republika" & not available on the internet- yet. In short, her "theory" on pluricentric languages is bunk. For those interested in serbocroatist way of thinking, here is her page: http://www.snjezana-kordic.de/ Mir Harven (talk) 15:53, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

a political linguist on a payroll of some proponents of the ideology of serbocroatism - ROTFL. Get real. Just because brilliant Kordić smashes Croatian nationalist-ideologues-turned-linguists into pieces with her witty, cynical remarks, it doesn't mean that she's a part of some 'anti-Croatian conspiracy'. Her debunking of various nationalists myths (including entire 'theories' of what languages are suppose to be) are immensely enjoyable reading to any sane-minded individual. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 13:17, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Snježana Kordić's demagoguery has been unmasked so many times (another example of her ignorance & fabrications exposed is here: http://www.ids-mannheim.de/prag/sprachvariation/fgvaria/Kordic_PDF4.pdf) that an impartial person should take her existence & activity into account only as a sign of persistence of serbocroatian ideology. As a linguist, she has not produced a single work of any merit that could be compared to studies of living Croatian philologists and linguists (Katičić, Laszlo, Babić, Silić, Pranjković, Hercigonja, Malić, Tafra, Matasović, Vončina, Žagar, Samardžija, Gluhak, Barić, Hudeček, Mihaljević, ..) Mir Harven (talk) 11:03, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

It should probably first be integrated into Pluricentric language article, not here. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 12:57, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

BTW, I agree about "macrolanguage". That's just an Ethnologue term for diasystem. I don't know of other sources that use it. Also, in case this trivial point actually needs to be said, the "language of Serbia" comment is just a result of Ethnologue labeling each language with a single native country. Croatian is "a language of Croatia", but that doesn't mean that Croats in Bosnia don't speak Croatian. English is "a language of United Kingdom", but that doesn't mean that Usonians don't speak English. Also - and this might need to be said - the cladistics pages in Ethnologue are unreliable. They're computer generated. There are scores, perhaps hundreds, of cases where alternate spellings are used for a branch in the articles for different constituent languages, with the result that they are placed in different "families". For example, if whoever wrote the Bosnian article had decided to use a CCSS-based classification, while whoever wrote Serbian had decided to use a WSS-based classification, the family tree would show that Serbian is a West SS language while Bosnian is in a separate branch, Central SS. That doesn't mean that anyone at Ethnologue actually thinks they're in two different branches; it's entirely automated. — kwami (talk) 15:40, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

I've looked at this again and noticed your claims about those two US programs. Can you provide that in the form of a proper citation? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 13:14, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Historical use

Colleague Ivan Štambuk wrote on 05:20, 27 April 2010 (in signature it's 03:20) [10] "The rest of the world, in particular Slavist linguistic circles worldwide, have no illusions that we're dealing with trivially-differing national varieties of one and only language that has been called Serbo-Croatian for centuries."
So-called Serbo-Croatian was kept alive by the force of weapons. It was introducted in mid-19th century.
The term "Croatian language" is much older.
Here're some books from the Library of HAZU. Check with the search page [11].

• 1495 (1543, 1586) [12] Bernardin Splićanin: Pistvle i Evanyelya po sfe godischie harvatschim yazichom stumacena
• 1521 (1522, 1586, 1627 [13]) [14] Marko Marulić: Libar Marca Marula Splichianina ...uersih haruacchi slosena
• 1597 [15] (1621 [16]) Dominko Zlatarić. Elektra tragedia ; Glivbmir, pripovies pastirska...Is vechie tugieh iesika u Harvackij isloxene...
• 1657 [17] (1702 [18]) Franjo Glavinić Istranin: ..prenešen i složen na harvatski jezik katoličanskim...
• 1688 [19] The Archbishop of Split Stipan Cosmi declares new orders for its parishes in 1688 in Latin and in Croatian, in the was that he has translated the term "illyricus" with the term "hrvatski" (idiomo Illyrico - harvaskoga izgovora; clero Illyrico - klera harvaskoga. First page [20].
• 1727 The Franciscan Lovro Sitović Ljubušak in his work "Pisma od pakla : ...izvede i harvatski jezik pivagne otacz F. Lovro Gliubusckoga..." (printed in Venice in 1727) has said that is wrote it in Harvatski jezik.
• 1747 [21] Bernardin Pavlović. Priprauglegnie za dostoino ... i u' haruaski jezik pomgliuo i virno privedeno ...
• 1747 [22] Pripraugle[gne] k s misi... prinesene iz latinskoga u harvaski jezik za lasnost i potribu misnikah Harvachianah
• 1817 [23] Navuk zemelyzke jabuke ... iz nemskega na horvaczko preneshen ... - Vu Zagrebu

Political pact called Vienna Literary Agreement was from 1850.
I hope this was helpful. Kubura (talk) 04:46, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

I think many contributors to the discussion actually don't know about the terminology used here. So, I'll try to throw in my 0.02 $:

a) "old" names can be freely ignored (Illyrian, Slovin, Dalmatian, Ragusan, Slavonian,...)

b) from the 19th century on, Croats used to call their language "Croatian" or, in instances where language communion with Serbs was implied, "Croatian or Serbian". The term "Serbo-Croatian", introduced by Kopitar, Dobrovsky, Budmani,.. was never in use among Croats- it was considered to point to Serbian language. Briefly, from 1950s to 1960s, the imposed (Novi Sad "agreement") term "Croato-Serbian" was in use- for Croatian, while "Serbo-Croatian" meant- as always: Serbian. After the collapse of Communism, Croats dropped the term "Croatian or Serbian" and retained only "Croatian" on any level. "Serbo-Croatian" is and has always meant, simply, Serbian language.

c) Serbs called their language Serbian, and in case when referring to the language communion with Croats, Serbo-Croatian. They have never (with the only exception of Đura Daničić) called their language "Serbian or Croatian", or "Croato-Serbian".

d) the language in Bosnia and Herzegovina was called, in various periods, differently. In Communist Yugoslavia, it was officially "Serbo-Croatian" (even in Croat-majority areas), which in essence conveyed the actual meaning- it was Serbian language of ijekavian pronunciation, with some minor Croatian lexical stuff added.

e) so, however the English term may have originated, it doesn't reflect languages histories and actual state. "Serbo-Croatian" leads to inaccurate implications: that, say, Croatian writers in the 16th and 17th century (Petar Hektorović, Bartol Kašić) had written in some alloy of Croatian and Serbian, or, they wrote in "actually" Serbian language- since "Serbo-Croatian" reads "Serbian". Nothing more and nothing less.Mir Harven (talk) 21:15, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

It should be added that the terminological confusion is only that - terminological confusion. The underlying language structure (grammar, dialectal bass, lexis) for centuries drew on the same core, the same body of literature. Broz-Iveković's Rječnik hrvatskoga jezika from 1901 was mostly based on Serbian folk works collected by Vuk Karadžić. Broz-Iveković's dictionary OTOH is used as a basis for 2008's Matasović's comparative-historical grammar of "Croatian". It's all deeply connected and intertwined to the point that it's impossible to state which word, norm, construct has its roots in which ethnically colored literary tradition. Some Croatian linguists are "shocked" to find out that "pure Croatian words" find their way into modern-day Serbian dictionaries. Some Serbian linguists are equally shocked that Serbian youngsters, especially those from Republika Srpska, have adopted many a "Croatism" in their speech. People don't care for ethnic "origins" of a word, as long as it serves its only purpose - communication. Terminology itself is unlikely to change in the near future, but speech in these countries is likely to grow more homogenized than ever. The process of reestablishing cultural "Yugosphere" (as Tim Judah calls it) has started, and now that it's completely spontaneous (on the level of free individuals), it's irreversible. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:36, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

These terms are completely obsolete and worthless. "Croatia" centuries ago meant entirely different thing, not at all the strangely-shaped country which it is today. Prior to the 19th century the Slavic predecessors of modern-day self-styled Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs an Montenegrins utilized a variety of regional appellations, and their language was regularly called simply "Slavic". Most of what is today called "old Croatian literature" has no concrete ethnic affiliation with Croats whatsoever. Read Old Dubrovnikan writers if you don't believe. In some of them Croats are moreover treated as foreigners. Modern-day Croatian national literary standard is a direct continuation of the former Serbo-Croatian standard of Yugoslavia, which has its ultimate roots in Vienna Literary Agreement signed by the most prominent figures of Croatia National Revival. Before that, people used various regional dialects as literary languages, but in the end only this stylized form of Eastern Herzegovinian reigned supreme, which is in globalized English-speaking world of today usually called Serbo-Croatian. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:24, 2 May 2010 (UTC)