Here is a quote from the late Serbian linguist Ivan Klajn:

"Experts have the viewpoint that if 70 percent of the words between two languages are common, then they are not languages but variants of the same language. And in our case it is not 70, but over 90 percent".

Original quote in Serbian: http://www.rtv.rs/sr_lat/drustvo/govore-li-srbi-hrvati-bosnj...

Okay… but then where do you draw the boundaries between the Germanic languages? What constitutes a language will always be political, until the day we stop drawing borders between languages.

Try playing a German movie without subtitles to an English person and then do the same with a Serbian movie and a Croatian person and you will have your answer.

People either understand each other or they don't. There's absolutely nothing political about that.

Try playing a German movie without subtitles to a Dutch person, and then do the same with a Geordie movie and a Yankee.

Speaking of… Wikipedia (Dutch):

> Wikipedia is een online encyclopedie die ernaar streeft inhoud te bieden die vrij herbruikbaar, objectief en verifieerbaar is. Het project is gebouwd op vijf zuilen. De Nederlandstalige versie startte op 19 juni 2001 en is, gemeten naar het aantal lemma's, met meer dan 2 miljoen artikelen de op vijf na grootste taalversie.

And Wikipedia (German):

> Das Ziel der Wikipedia ist der Aufbau einer Enzyklopädie durch freiwillige und ehrenamtliche Autoren. Der Name Wikipedia setzt sich zusammen aus Wiki (entstanden aus wiki, dem hawaiischen Wort für ‚schnell‘), und encyclopedia, dem englischen Wort für ‚Enzyklopädie‘. Ein Wiki ist ein Webangebot, dessen Seiten jeder leicht und ohne technische Vorkenntnisse direkt im Webbrowser bearbeiten kann.

Different languages. Neither is too hard for an English speaker. (If in doubt, try pronouncing the words.)

While I'm at it, Wikipedia (French):

> Wikipédia est un projet d’encyclopédie collective en ligne, universelle, multilingue et fonctionnant sur le principe du wiki. Ce projet vise à offrir un contenu librement réutilisable, objectif et vérifiable, que chacun peut modifier et améliorer.

Also a different language! But just you tell me you don't understand that.

Play any Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian movie anywhere in Serbia/Croatia/Bosnia, and nobody would need any subtitles; that's the point. In Croatia, they (sometimes?) subtitle Serbian movies, for great comic effect.

Many different languages are mutually intelligible. Many dialects of the same language are not mutually intelligible. That's because the ways people speak don't divide up neatly into languages.

This is the same language. Three different names for political reasons.

I'd like to invite you to Belgium, a trilingual country. And no, here a lot of people don't speak all three (nor even the major two). French and Flemish are not close to each other at all.

Your comment sounds fine on the surface, if you don't actually stop to think about it. It's horribly wrong in lots of Europe, Africa, south America and Asia, hell even in the US it's not correct everywhere.

Yeah, it's only really true of the Germanics (and English with the basic vocabulary of a few languages, because English is weird) ­– but even then, questionably.