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| Mankogadaisuki Decaglot Newbie Brazil Joined 3918 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Spanish, Galician, Arabic (classical), Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, German | Message 1 of 3 22 March 2014 at 1:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Slavic branch
The languages referred to as Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian by some language enthusiasts, politics, linguists etc, are they really different languages or dialects of one common language? Could you please tell me briefly what is your position concerning the meaning of language and dialect? Do they share more similarities than Czech and Slovak languages? I came to this question after reading one blog whose owner separated his language logs in three different topics assuming that they are three different languages. How similar are they in terms of morphology, phonology and vocabulary? Can any native speaker of one of the languages above understand the other two very easily? What was (were) the official language(s) of the former Yugoslavia? What was (were) the language taught there in the schools? What was (were) the official script used by that time? I understand that especially after the war, forced immigration abroad and genocide have created acrimony between the nations of former Yugoslavia. As far as I understood from the articles I have been reading so far, Croats, Bosnians and Serbs want to re-affirm their differences looking for their own sense of identity. Maybe this might be one reason politician state that they speak different languages. I do not want to post 1001 topics, so, here are some other questions still related to some Slavic branch family languages. What is the official language in Montenegro? There are some countries that still use the Cyrillic alphabet, though some others use Latin alphabet. Is there any country that has changed an alphabet based on Cyrillic alphabet to one based on Latin alphabet or vice versa? If it happened, why the government decided to change? Consider only those countries whose languages belongs to Slavic family. If there are countries whose official scripts are those based on Latin and Cyrillic alphabet, how do they teach at schools? What are the criteria? By the way, I am not sure if I can edit the message. If the moderators and other members think that I asked too many questions, I might separate the topics in the forum next time. Anyway, I am not asking you to answer everything. I will be glad if at least one of the questions above will be answered. Edited by Mankogadaisuki on 22 March 2014 at 1:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
 DavidStyles Octoglot Pro Member United Kingdom Joined 3943 days ago 82 posts - 179 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, French, Portuguese, Norwegian Studies: Mandarin, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 3 22 March 2014 at 2:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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This very readable article will answer most (if not all) of your questions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian_language Or, if you don't find it so readable in English (I note that despite posting in English you don't list it as a language you speak, so perhaps only this more simple level of interaction is ok for you), then the article is quite good in German, which you might read more easily, judging from your profile: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbokroatische_Sprache The Portuguese article isn't very good. Meanwhile, in short... Politicians tend to be much more ready than linguists to call something a separate language, that's for sure. And yes, one can point to differing phonetic rules or differing vocabulary, but frankly, there are similar levels of difference (both phonetic and semantic) between English as spoken in Manchester and English as spoken in London, and nobody claims these to be distinct languages. Orthography differs more in the BSCM language set, of course, but this is a rather more minor consideration. Edited by DavidStyles on 22 March 2014 at 2:08am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 3 22 March 2014 at 4:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
My short answer is that they're variants of one language. On one hand, dialect and language can mean the same to me when I strip out sociolinguistic judgements or popular wisdom. On the other hand, "language" can imply something standard or codified, whereas dialect can imply something non-standard or uncodified.
A resounding yes when it comes to comparing the morphology, phonology, lexicon of each variant. Czech and Slovak diverge from each other more than intra-BCMS assuming that we're talking about the standard languages.
The mutual intelligibility of BCMS/SC is very high. It's so high that sometimes not even native speakers can honestly say that another native speaker is speaking a different language because of the overlap (this is especially common when different ethnicities live very close to each other for a few generations e.g. a Croatian Serb villager is indistinguishable linguistically from the Croatian Croat living next door) You'll probably find this study "To what degree are Croatian and Serbian the same language? Evidence from a translation Study (2010)" led by an American linguist, John Bailyn to be very interesting. The experiment involved getting Croats to "translate" or adapt several short texts from Serbia (i.e. in "Serbian") to their native language. For me, Bailyn accomplished something like proving that water is wet as it relates to the question in the title.
In (the Kingdom of) Yugoslavia, the official language was "Serbo-Croatian-Slovene" (I'm not kidding). This took Illyrianism and Yugoslavism too far since Slovenian has been / is noticeably distinct from BCMS/SC despite the romantic idea of thinking of at least some Southern Slavs as so closely related that their languages had to be just as similar to merit such a compounded term. Off the record, there were two official languages: Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian. The lack of fact-checking probably caused some political embarrassment for the founders of Yugoslavia who slapped this "Serbo-Croatian-Slovene" label as the kingdom's official language. In (communist) Yugoslavia, the official languages were Slovenian, Macedonian and BCMS/SC (in Croatia this was usually called "Croato-Serbian" but sometimes also "Western variant"; in Serbia this was usually called "Serbo-Croatian" but sometimes also "Eastern variant"). Slovenian kids learned Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian at school, Macedonian kids learned Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian at school. The rest of them learned just Croato-Serbian (typically Croatia) or Serbo-Croatian (typically Serbia. If I remember correctly what a Bosnian (Moslem) co-worker told me long ago, she learned Croato-Serbian when she went to school in Sarajevo. When it came the script, the policy was that anyone learning "Croato-Serbian" or "Serbo-Croatian" was to learn both Cyrillic and Latinic (a common pattern was that the alphabet used in lessons and homework assignments would alternate every week. In practice things weren't this even-handed everywhere). No matter which era of Yugoslavia you talk about, Croatian or Croato-Serbian in print has always been Latinic only. Serbian or Serbo-Croatian in print has been in either script, but using mainly Cyrillic script came to appeal to some nationalist Serbs as a marker of distinctiveness. In (post-communist) Yugoslavia (today's Serbia and Montenegro), the official language was Serbo-Croatian from 1992 to 1997, and then Serbian from 1997 to 2006.
Yes, language's role for nationalists from the former Yugoslavia is often symbolic and used to erect barriers in the mindset of "us" against "them". On the other hand, this urge to fiddle with language to align better with political or geographical distinctions has died down since the 90s, and a lot of people are now tired of such nonsense and resent politicians or linguists extrapolating judgements of how people speak as markers of loyalty to whomever is sitting on the throne in the capital city.
Montenegrin.
As far as I can remember, Belorussian (or more accurately "Old Belorussian" or Old Ruthenian) was expressed visually in Cyrillic, but during the 19th century a fairly stable convention using the Latin alphabet came about after a few centuries of Belorussian Catholics using ad hoc Latinic transcriptions of texts in Cyrillic. This Belorussian Latinic alphabet never really took off and its use today is still limited. This doesn't quite suit your question though since the development and policy for Belorussian scripts didn't always arise neatly from government directives considering that there wasn't a Belorussian government per se or Belorussian nation-state until the 20th century. *** It's rather good that you asked these questions about BCMS/SC now. I've struggled with similar questions since that time many years ago when starting out with "Teach Yourself Croatian" and then "Introduction to the Croatian and Serbian Language". However a few years ago I came to the conclusion that we're dealing with a pluricentric language comparable to English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese or even Hindustani (i.e. Hindi-Urdu) after having read many articles on the subject. Last year, I backed up my conclusions by comparing not only the transcripts in "Beginner's Croatian"* and "Beginner's Serbian"* but also analyzing a monograph by some Croatian computational linguists which highlights differences observed in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian editions of a newspaper. I analyzed differences in the transcripts and examples in that monograph using descriptive dictionaries, reference manuals of grammar and even comments from Croats and Serbs on language forums about use or ethnic association of certain words or structures. The examples and all the research greatly refined my understanding and put the relationship within BCMS/SC in perspective. You can find links to my posts on this subject in the BCMS profile (scroll down to "LINKS AND SOURCES" and you'll see several links to posts in my log "Chung pri práci") *These books were written by the same authors and the transcripts are practically identical after accounting for name changes, stereotyping of standard variants, and different geographical references) Edited by Chung on 22 March 2014 at 4:47am 9 persons have voted this message useful |
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