mondediplo.com <https://mondediplo.com/2017/07/16serbo-croatian>
Write as you speak?, by Jean-Arnault Dérens & Simon Rico (Le Monde diplomatique 3-4 minutes _____ Serbo-Croatian is often presented as an artificial language, a political creation of the 19th century. The desire to unify and standardise the languages of the Slavic peoples of southern Europe, divided among different political entities, was inseparable from the assertion of a common identity. By the Vienna Convention of 1850, Serbian and Croatian intellectuals agreed to unify the variants of the language that would eventually become known as Serbo-Croatian. It was standardised by Vuk Karadžić (1787-1864), a Serb, and Ljudevit Gaj (1809-72), a Croat, leader of the Illyrian movement, which used the Štokavian dialect — although it was not spoken in Zagreb — in its newspapers and to establish a Croatian literary language. French is an unusual case: it was considered an element of sovereignty by the absolutist monarchy from the time of the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1539), and was codified from an early date with the creation of the French Academy (1635). Until the end of the 19th century, neither Finnish nor German was codified, and modern Swedish only appeared at the turn of the 20th century. In Greece, Demotic, a long-disdained popular form of the language, only officially replaced the archaic Katharevousa in 1976. So Serbo-Croatian was one of the earliest European languages to be standardised. This standardisation allowed several variants and validated the use of two alphabets, linked by a strict system of correspondences. Some letters specific to the Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic alphabet do not exist in the Russian or Bulgarian writing systems, and the Roman alphabet uses diacritics to represent certain sounds — such as the caron (an inverted circumflex) placed on a ž for a soft j, š for sh or č for ch. The phonetic transcription of the language was based on the principle ‘write as you speak’ laid down by Karadžić, so variations in pronunciation were also noted, especially variants of the sound ‘e’, derived from the primitive ‘iat’ of Slavic languages. This gives ‘e’ in the ‘dry’ Ekavian form of the language, and ‘je’ or ‘ije’ in the ‘wet’ Ijekavian form. There has always been a temptation to nationalise these variants and regard the Ekavian form as characteristic of Serbia, the Ijekavian form being dominant in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Montenegro. In Dalmatia and Istria (regions of Croatia) there is a third variant, Ikavian, which was not recognised. Linguists also distinguish three dialect groups, Štokavian, Kajkavian and Čakavian, by their word for ‘what?’ — the first is dominant, and the other two are found only in some regions of Croatia. These dialectal nuances are geographical and possibly social, but never national: Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs in the same town or region of Bosnia and Herzegovina all speak the same language, with the same accent.
