Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian

[Johannes Heinecke]

On Fri Oct  6 13:43:57 1995, E Wayles Browne <ewb2 at cornell.edu> wrote:

...
> 2) Many members of the SEELANGS list are involved in teaching and
> organizing language courses. We often have native speakers teach
> such courses. We hire a Russian to teach a Russian course, a Pole
> to teach Polish, etc. But we cannot hire a Serbo-Croat to teach a
> Serbo-Croatian course. Whoever we hire will have an active knowledge
> of only one of the variants: of Serbian if he/she went to school
> in Serbia, of Croatian if schooled in Croatia, of Bosnian if edu-
> cated in Bosnia and Hercegovina. Part of a teacher's duties is
> correcting homework papers. A user of Serbian can correct a home-
> work paper written by a student attempting to learn the standard
> of Serbia, but cannot accurately correct a homework paper submitted
> by a student seeking to acquire the standard of Croatia.
> And vice versa.
...

Is it therefore right to say that all people grown up and educated
in, say Sarajevo, speak/write Bosnian, and those from Zagreb speak/write
Croatian etc, irrespectable whether they are ethnic Kroats, Serbs or Muslims?

If so, wouldn't it be an idea to restrict terms Bosnian, Croatian
and Serbian to ethnics and label the variants of Serbo-Croat
differently (i.e. ekavski/ijekavski or zagrebski/beogradski)

What language do those people speak who grew up in different places
(maybe due to the fact that parents did work in different places and
had to move every other year)?

Johannes Heinecke
Humboldt Universit"at zu Berlin
<heinecke at compling.hu-berlin.de>