It depends, I also speak German so I know what you're saying. It's a spectrum where narrower band is between Croatia and Serbia and Bosnia (although lexicopgrahical difference is quite there!) and a wider band between let's say Slovenia and Macedonia. Not talking about dialect, just grammar and especially lexicon - since dialects within ye olde republics is also quite something (zagorski, dalmatinski, šumandinski..). Good thing you've mentioned german though, since they have Hochdeutsch. We had it as well "srpsko-hrvatski ili hrvatsko-srpski" (actual full name not to offend anyone lol), but that died after Yugoslavia and ever since divergence grew even moreso.

I think the most correct way to put it is that srpsohrvatski or whatever you want to call it is a pluricentric language with a few mutually intelligible standards the same way German is.

Austrian High German is different from German High German is different from Swiss High German.

For example, Austrians refer to bread rolls as "Semmeln", while Germans call them "Brötchen". Austrians tend to avoid the Preterite in spoken language, while Germans use it pretty frequently etc etc.

"Ich holte mir eine Tüte Brötchen" vs "Ich habe mir ein Sackerl Semmeln geholt", for a practical example.

And yet we consider it the same language.

And now you're making the fallacy of differentiating by the German-Austrian border and not the Danube.

Source: Am Bavarian, we're officially nearly a fourth of Germany and the Austrians talk like we do ;)

More seriously, I couldn't tell you if anything about tenses is written (and differently) in Austrian school books, or if it's just the dialect creeping up.

What I can tell you that your example sounds kinda made up, although of course I know it's proper German.

Yes, Austro-Bavarian is one language group. That being said, I was talking about formalized language standards, not spoken language.

It's called BCMS, Bosnian Croatian, Macedonian Serbian. Ili da ti prevedem Bosanski, Hrvatski, Makedonski I Sr..

Sorry, but I prefer to stay with the Yugoslav term - adding more and more letters is just another expression of petty nationalism.

Also, the M in BCMS is Montenegrin, the latest made-up language, not Macedonian (which is separate). Seems like not even the defenders of linguistic seperatism can keep up with the insanity ;-)

I wrote BCMS in my original post because it saves me the most trouble. If I say "Serbo-Croatian", a lot of people bristle at that. As a foreigner, I can't say "naški". And if I name the specific variety that I learned years ago when I had to buy a textbook, people might accuse me of having political sympathies with that country. (I get a lot of grief from people about this when I am in the region: "as a foreigner, why did you choose to speak with vocabulary typical of that country and not our country?").

I understand where you're coming from. I'd love if we could just call it the Yugoslav Language, or Yugoslavian, but that might just be me :-)

You're trying and that is respectable. People that do "govore po našem" or speak ours can and do often push their version most suited for their aims. Notice there is no "nas" or us in that version.

Hey wait - I know that Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian are very similar. But Macedonian is basically a dialect of Bulgarian and Slovenian has a much more complicated grammar than BCS, it still has the dual and stuff like that. Slovenian and Macedonian are definitely different languages. Most Slavic languages are actually still reasonably close anyway - if you have a little exposure you can at least get the gist. My wife is a native Polish speaker and grew up during communism so learned Russian in school. She can more or less understand Czech and Slovak (as they are both reasonably close to Polish), and also Russian and Ukrainian (including the more Western dialects like Lemko.) By extension, she has a pretty good grasp of the basics of the other Slavic languages. That doesn't make any of those languages a dialect of Polish though.

Yes, BCMS and Slovenian and Macedonian/Bulgarian are generally regarded as different languages, but historically the region had dialect continuums and mutual intelligibility can go across those languages.

The Torlak dialect of Serbian is so transitional to Bulgarian/Macedonian that it could fairly be called a dialect of the latter. Even outside that dialect, it's not at all unusual to see Macedonians and Serbs in general converse, each person speaking his own language.

Similarly, the Croatian dialect spoken in the northwest of Croatia (which has become increasingly fashionable after independence) is transitional to Slovenian and there is greater mutual intelligibility than with standard Croatian.

>differences of German [...] are much more significant than the differences between various forms of Serbo-Croatian.

Maybe, but it adds no argument to the issue of the same lang vs different langs. There's no clear purely linguistical distinction between dialect and language. As an old joke goes a language is a dialect with an army. In other words when it has a separate political status, and governed by a separate body - it's a language, no matter how similar it to other languages. The reason is that a literary/official language is defined by rules, and as rules are defined by separate entities, existing differences will be preserved, and new will emerge, and multiply eventually.

It actually does. German has three armies, yet is one language.

It does only if you prefer to take the "army" part absolutely literally. Which you shouldn't because, as clearly stated, it's a joke. Literary German is governed by the one regulatory body - Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung - recognized not by three, but seven European countries. And this what makes German one language. If tomorrow, say, Liechtenstein will decide it's not going to follow the same rules, there will be two.