Woods wrote:And talking of Wikipedia, has there ever been a discussion of merging the Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian versions or is it out of the question?
Yes. There is already a Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, but obviously many speakers refuse to participate there. The project for a Montenegrin Wikipedia was refused on the grounds that it would not be sufficiently different from the other four language versions (sr, hr, bs, sh), and I remember the decision including the argument that there were only four versions in the first place because people requested them before Wikipedia had any clear guidelines on what sort of projects would be eligible (so if they applied now only Serbo-Croatian would be eligible for a project).
Saim, what is your opinion of what is the most historically-accurate way to call this language ?
Personally I'm partial to just calling it Shtokavian (and treating Kaikavian, Chakavian and Torlak as separate languages), but I don't think that's a particularly realistic solution at present. I tend to call it Serbian by default but then use the term "Serbo-Croatian" if it's necessary to specify that it's the same language. In Serbian itself we either call it
srpski [Serbian] or
naš jezik [our language] or
naš [our] --
srpskohrvatski has fallen out of use almost entirely. I also occasionally say
be-ce-ha-es (BCHS - I've also heard
be-ce-ka-es based on the German version of the initialism) when talking to Serbo-Croatian speakers who have studied linguistics or philology, but this is still a bit of a stuffy academic term that is unlikely to be broadly adopted.
I'm not sure what you mean by "historically accurate". Do you mean the first term used to refer to the language? I'd have to check to be sure, but as far as I can recall the earliest Shtokavian literature from Croatia uses terms like "slovinski/slovanski" (Slavic; i.e. not Venetian, Istriot, Italian/Tuscan or Dalmatian) and "dubrovački" (Dubrovnik language). I'm not sure what language term Serbian epic poetry used, if any.
EDIT: Come to think of it, I think the term "hrvatski" (Croatian) for different South Slavic varieties appeared quite early but it didn't win out as essentially the only term used among Croats until the 20th Century.
But what is first, objectively - Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia
All three states were created as federal units of socialist Yugoslavia in 1945. Croatia was the first of the three to secede from Yugoslavia, so as a modern nation-state you could say Croatia came first, I guess. In terms of their current borders, they all trace them back to 1945 as far as I'm aware.
where did this language originate and did any country model its language after another one or did each of them always do their own thing and somehow the languages happened to be the same even though nobody admitted it? I bet Serbia was most influential during Yugoslav times.
The Croatian tradition was consciously and deliberately moved towards the Serbian one due to pan-Slavism and the fact that vernacular Shtokavian was already widely used in Croatia (but not in the more developed western part). As far as I understand there was already a sort of Croatian koiné before the Vienna and Novi Sad language agreements, and it wasn't as clearly Shtokavian as the current standard.
This is for the standard/literary varieties. As for the natural dialects, Shtokavian spread westward and northward as a response to Ottoman incursions in the 1600s and 1700s. This is why the
Eastern Herzegovinian dialect specifically shows non-contiguous distribution throughout the central area of the former Yugoslavia, and this dialect of Shtokavian forms the basis of all four standards. (The two largest cities in Serbia, Novi Sad and Belgrade, traditionally speak Vojvodinian-Shumadian, which is also quite close to Eastern Herzegovinian, and has ended up influencing the current form of the Serbian prestige dialect).