User:Ivan Štambuk/Serbo-Croatian

This page will be used as an overview of Serbo-Croatian language material I collected, pertaining to the (at the moment) unofficial WT:ASH draft policy, its vote and everything else related.

• Opinions - the testimonies of some of professional linguists and SC professors I gathered via e-mail, and my comments

• Perceptions - review of the comments of native Bosniak/Croat/Serb speakers that voted against the merger, here and on their main Wiki-projects. The fundamental divide on the "standard language" as a badge of self-identification, and as a real-life communication code, and the incompatibility of the former perception with the fundamental tenets of this projects (AKA "Languages have nothing to do with linguistics", (c) Mir Harven).

• Practical concerns - review of the practical (lexicographic, translation) concerns of SC language(s) issue. In particular the assignment of different hrv/srp tags by the Library of Congress, the interpretation of speech in the ICTY cases, and the curious case of the 1920 Serbian-English dictionary which abounds in "Croatian words".

• Total Serbification - translation of an amusing recent Serbian newspaper article expressing "concerns" of Croatiazation of Serbian language _{podnaslov: srbožderni titoisti lingvocidišu srpski jezik i posl(ij)e obezglavljenja komunističke kimere}

• Google translate - Google uses the same translation engine for both Serbian and Croatian, only differing in base lexical items that are tagged as "Croatian" or "Serbian", when they are different (corresponding to Ijekavian/Ekavian variants of the same word).

Some illuminating essays and misc. excerpts on the sociolinguistics perspective of Serbo-Croatian I've gathered:

• Nationalism and Language: A Balkan Experience, by Božidar Jakšić, 1997
• Sociolinguistic Analysis of Serbo-Croatian, by Sean McLennan, 1996_{Note that this article has some nonsense in it.}
• Encyclopaedia Britannica's take, on the Serbo-Croatian language and people, from 1911 to 2009 edition. This is what you get when you pay professionals to write encyclopedic articles, and not nationalist bigots with identity crisis.
• Native linguists, quotes of some Bosniak/Croat/Serb linguists that scientifically corroborate the oneness of B/C/S = Serbo-Croatian