As a Yugoslav war refugee, this is spot on.

Small sidenote: Even if all of these languages are effectively one big "super-Balkan" language it is a _very_ divisive point from an ethnicity perspective given the number of conflicts this region has had over the centuries. While it's not my cup of tea, the reality is that people from the Balkans will often judge others from that region (both positively and negatively) based on these almost-imperceptible language differences since they signal to the listener some degree of ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic level, and education level.

A language is a dialect with an army.

There are, perhaps, few places where this is more true than in the Balkans. At least none come to mind.

As an anecdote, a friend once told me, that to really speak a language you must be able to understand jokes and poetry in that language. I tend to agree. With that in mind it's worth mentioning that to a great extent people from Serbia, Croatia, BH, and Montenegro listen to the same music, read the same literature, and tell the same jokes

> Serbo-Croatian – also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin.

There's also some story about how these all derive from Shtokavian via Eastern Herzegovinian, so those might be useful names too.

And, of course, how could we forget the Balkan sprachbund [2]!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund

A teacher at a Bronx high school once appeared among the auditors. He had come to America as a child and the entire time had never heard that Yiddish had a history and could also serve for higher matters.... Once after a lecture he approached me and asked, 'What is the difference between a dialect and language?' I thought that the maskilic contempt had affected him, and tried to lead him to the right path, but he interrupted me: 'I know that, but I will give you a better definition. A language is a dialect with an army and navy.' From that very time I made sure to remember that I must convey this wonderful formulation of the social plight of Yiddish to a large audience.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

In fact its the dialect spoken by the majority of people in Croatia (even though Stokavian is the "official" Croatian) and sometimes argued to be more than just a dialect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajkavian

Personally I always found the comparison "Croatian vs. Serbian is the same as US English vs. British" a great oversimplification. It's not just an intonation or alphabet, it's also a lot more different words (that might mean the same things) than for example between the variants of English. Yes, people understand each other - but they're also attuned to all the different dialects within the "main language groups" so they actually know/learn more words for same objects (for example Croatians will be happy to list different words for bread/tomatos/etc i.e. synonyms that they might know the meaning of but don't necessarily use daily - and those different synonyms depending on the dialect might be closer to Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Italian, Turkish, Hungarian or old Austrian).

In a way I think this invalidates the premise of the article - that there is "a peculiar form of theater going on" and that the governments are pretending by needing court translators. If the countries are using not only different alphabets, but in part also different words (even though that other surrounding countries might somewhat understand those different words) - whats a viable alternative then?

Also, doesn't your claim that BCS speakers are attuned to different dialect groups and understand their terms even further undermine the claim that there's an actual need for translation? By and large, speakers of English aren't (although thanks to Hollywood everybody knows some American), but an Aussie in NYC or a Brit in Melbourne is not going to have any real issues communicating.

Don't think that undermines my claim at all - they understand the words because they're familiar within the slavic language group in general (even though they might be derivations and used or spelled differently). Its like saying Italian/Spanish are the same because speakers might understand words between them. With the translation argument - you also of course have to ignore the fact that Serbia writes in cyrillic and Croatia in latin alphabet.

Basically, the point is about what defines a language as a distinct one.

Grammar is pretty much the same with one standard preferring one form or the other (eg. infinitive vs "da" + present). Vocabulary is over 90% identical, though I am sure top 500 words in both spoken dialects have a larger discrepancy. Alphabets are different, but they are almost bijectively mapped (only differ orthographically in digraphs like NJ/Nj/nj where Cyrillic has only Њ/њ), and you may have missed it, but Serbian population actually uses Latin script for >80% of all Serbian writing.

The article mentions a push to differentiate languages further, probably most evident in Croatia in early 90s.

But three students in Bosnia speaking identical language (grammar/vocabulary thougj the script might differ) of 3 different nationalities would officially claim they speak three different languages. If you don't see the absurdity in that, that's up to you.