>As for your question: both governments (and "their" people), while keeping their armies and recyprocal independence (for now), agree that it is the same language, even if they may some day disagree about its name.
Seeing that Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian have been given their own separate ISO 639 codes, for almost purely political reasons (they are dialects)
A number of cases exist where two languages are very close to each other and/or two dialects are rather different. It's not uncommon at all to base the distinction on extralinguistic factors in such cases, such as political entities or nationalisms behind them. If two political entities exist, you've got two languages. Another factor may be whether both are in common written usage.
Typical cases include Persian and Tajik or Czech and Slovak, where both are very close to each other at least in their written form, but usually referred to as different languages. On the other hand, you have Plattdeutsch and Bavarian, where the differences are major, there is hardly any mutual intelligibility, and yet they are considered dialects, mainly because both are spoken within the same political entity and both are written far less frequently than German, the language they're supposed to be dialects of. Or you have the Arabic dialects, also not really mutually intelligible, but held together by the more or less extralinguistic fact that the reference language is used for religious purposes by all speakers.
This is really a moot point. The separate inclusion of Moldavian and Romanian and of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian in ISO 639 is due to a political decision. This is a perfectly normal thing; languages are political beasts.
Philipp
