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While pretty much all mentioned wikis share same bias and mistrust towards them, apart technical articles... Proposed solutions make sense, except for Encourag

While pretty much all mentioned wikis share same bias and mistrust towards them, apart technical articles... Proposed solutions make sense, except for Encouraging the affected communities to discuss the possibility of re-merging Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian language projects into the original Serbo-Croatian language projects to re-align with the practices of other pluricentric Wikipedia language versions. Which will not happen, and on top of it is border-line offensive and shows a dose of not understanding the differences. Serbo-croatian or Croato-serbian (as the full name of the language is) was an artificially constructed language during social-communist Yugoslavia. All involved parties agreed to part ways on unification of the languages for a myriad of reasons, not all political ones.. and that's now water over the bridge.. and now this entity, probably through ignorance, wants to offer re-introduction of the topic which countries have fought wars over? Nah. One of the reasons why SH (serbo-croatian) wiki even exists is because there's a group of people living in the past and which makes, for themselves, communities like that. Raisong the issue as a possible course of resokution and common ground not only gives legitimacy to it, but is border-line offensive and absolutely ignorant of the issues at hand. Otherwise, apart from that, great. Something needs to haooen to ex yugoslavian wikis throughout to make them at least half-thrustworthy.

zozbot234 5y ago
Serbo-Croatian is a family of very closely related languages. There are some differences in lexicon and script, but there are also differences among varieties of English. And you could write English down using a different script like Devanagari, but this would not somehow make it into a different language.
- dragandj 5y ago
  > There are some differences in lexicon and script Even this is only to a point; namely, all these languages use Latin alphabet, while Serbian also uses Cyrillic (Serbian uses both alphabets). Croatian originally used Glagolitic script (many centuries ago). This Latin/Cyrillic division is caused by Catholic/Orthodox church split and Habsburg/Ottoman empire border rather than being some central feature in languages.
locallost 5y ago
This is unfortunately complete baloney, and I really cannot find a better word. The differences between the languages are not greater than the differences between American and British English or German in Germany and Austria. In fact the language spoken by the Swiss cannot be understood by almost all Germans, yet it is still called German. The only artificial part are the names which stem from the inability to come to a compromise, e.g. neither side can accept to speak the language of the others. It needs one name because it is for all intents and purposes one language. Everything else is just politics. This view has recently also been supported by a group of linguists in the region, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_La...
- lima 5y ago
  > In fact the language spoken by the Swiss cannot be understood by almost all Germans, yet it is still called German. It's called "Schweizerdeutsch" (Swiss German) and is indeed a separate language. In fact, every region in Switzerland has a different dialect :-)
  - locallost 5y ago
    I speak German and as most others in Germany I do not understand Swiss German. My point was simply this: the similarities between those two are so tiny to a point that people who only speak one of those two would not be able to communicate. Yet they still find a way to put German into the language spoken by the Swiss. The differences between Serbian and Croatian are so tiny that people speaking only one of those would absolutely be able to understand each other. And this is true even after decades of partial isolation from one another.
    - dragandj 5y ago
      Even stronger: the differences in internal regional dialects within Serbia and Croatia, are sometimes larger than the differences between official Serbian and Croatian (although even these small differences in official languages are often artificial and politically forced into).
udba 5y ago
Certainly the naming of the language as "Serbo-Croatian" or "Croato-Serbian" happened in the Socialist period, but the Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, etc. etc. languages are really variants of a polycentric language [1], whatever you want to call it. For those not from the Balkans, imagine the British, Americans, and Canadians insisting that their versions of English are completely different languages, or making up new words to distance themselves from each other. Snježana Kordić's book made the case that there is a polycentric language shared by those countries and that much of the current politicking over this topic is nationalist in basis. I think it's easy to see that this bickering over language is yet another useful distraction from the catastrophic state of society and the economy in those lands. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Lang...

zozbot234 5y ago

Serbo-Croatian is a family of very closely related languages. There are some differences in lexicon and script, but there are also differences among varieties of English. And you could write English down using a different script like Devanagari, but this would not somehow make it into a different language.

dragandj 5y ago
> There are some differences in lexicon and script Even this is only to a point; namely, all these languages use Latin alphabet, while Serbian also uses Cyrillic (Serbian uses both alphabets). Croatian originally used Glagolitic script (many centuries ago). This Latin/Cyrillic division is caused by Catholic/Orthodox church split and Habsburg/Ottoman empire border rather than being some central feature in languages.

locallost 5y ago

This is unfortunately complete baloney, and I really cannot find a better word. The differences between the languages are not greater than the differences between American and British English or German in Germany and Austria. In fact the language spoken by the Swiss cannot be understood by almost all Germans, yet it is still called German. The only artificial part are the names which stem from the inability to come to a compromise, e.g. neither side can accept to speak the language of the others. It needs one name because it is for all intents and purposes one language. Everything else is just politics. This view has recently also been supported by a group of linguists in the region, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_La...

lima 5y ago
> In fact the language spoken by the Swiss cannot be understood by almost all Germans, yet it is still called German. It's called "Schweizerdeutsch" (Swiss German) and is indeed a separate language. In fact, every region in Switzerland has a different dialect :-)
- locallost 5y ago
  I speak German and as most others in Germany I do not understand Swiss German. My point was simply this: the similarities between those two are so tiny to a point that people who only speak one of those two would not be able to communicate. Yet they still find a way to put German into the language spoken by the Swiss. The differences between Serbian and Croatian are so tiny that people speaking only one of those would absolutely be able to understand each other. And this is true even after decades of partial isolation from one another.
  - dragandj 5y ago
    Even stronger: the differences in internal regional dialects within Serbia and Croatia, are sometimes larger than the differences between official Serbian and Croatian (although even these small differences in official languages are often artificial and politically forced into).

udba 5y ago

Certainly the naming of the language as "Serbo-Croatian" or "Croato-Serbian" happened in the Socialist period, but the Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, etc. etc. languages are really variants of a polycentric language [1], whatever you want to call it. For those not from the Balkans, imagine the British, Americans, and Canadians insisting that their versions of English are completely different languages, or making up new words to distance themselves from each other. Snježana Kordić's book made the case that there is a polycentric language shared by those countries and that much of the current politicking over this topic is nationalist in basis. I think it's easy to see that this bickering over language is yet another useful distraction from the catastrophic state of society and the economy in those lands. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Lang...