2756: The Serbo-Croatian Languages Jul 7, 2024

A speaker of Serbian may be considered a polyglot speaking four languages, politically, as the languages of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro are all the same, but the respective governments insist that they are different languages. This leads to translations on signs of exactly the same words, such as one famous example of the warning label on cigarette packs reading:

Pušenje Ubija

Pušenje Ubija

Пушење убија 

Granted the last example phonetically is the exact same but is written in the Cyrillic alphabet for Serbian while in Croatian and Bosnian it is based off the Latin alphabet. In a linguistic sense, these are considered dialects of one language, not separate languages, though this is not the position of the various governments. 

Governmental bodies may be slow to change regarding language, especially in places where there are regulatory bodies for the development of a language, such as French’s Académie Française, but in the example above it is not even clear which would be Croatian or Bosnian. Of course, the opposite situation occurs in Arabic and Chinese, two languages about which the political entities concerning them insists the differences are mere dialects, but this results in unintelligibility for speakers from different so-called ‘dialects.’