What language do people speak in the Balkans, anyway? (2019)

Re:What language do people speak in the Balkans, anyway? (2019) by medo-bear on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:42PM (#24984333)

I'm not a linguist but I think it would be useful to have a unifying term for these languages. If I say that I speak 4 languages at a native level, referring to the languages listed in the parent post, it's not exactly the same (to put it mildly) as someone speaking Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Czech at a native level, even if these languages too come from the same family.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What language do people speak in the Balkans, anyway? (2019) by twic on Tuesday November 03, 2020 @04:59PM (#24984499)

Wikipedia calls them all Serbo-Croatian [1], more or less:

> 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

[ Parent | on HN ]