Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian

[Jouko Lindstedt]

On Fri, 6 Oct 1995, Robert Beard wrote:

> I don't see this as a digression at all.  The dialectal isoglosses of
> Serbo-Croatian coincide neither with the boundaries of Croatian, Serbia, and
> Bosnia nor with the Croatian and Serbian dialect areas.  Indeed, as I
> originally pointed out, there is no such thing as a Croatian and Serbian
> dialect area, let alone language areas.

Isn't this the typical situation almost _always_ when we have
neighbouring related languages? The isoglosses do not coincide with the
Dutch/German political boundary, or in fact wiht _any_ of the South Slavic
political boundaries. So, is there only one South Slavic language, from
Slovene to Bulgarian -- no clear isogloss bundles anywhere?

> I remain convinced that the linguistic message is one of unity if not peace
> and linguists should not be party to the political motivations urging us to
> abandon out science.

The linguistics I was taught does not have one single answer to the
question whether, say, Macedonian and Bulgarian, or Swedish and Norwegian,
are one or two languages. What on earth could the criteria be?

Jouko Lindstedt
Department of Slavonic Languages, University of Helsinki
e-mail: Jouko.Lindstedt at Helsinki.Fi or jslindst at cc.helsinki.fi
http://www.helsinki.fi/~jslindst/