Language! Narf! [mostly OT]

[Stefan Diös]

Stefan P:

> > According to the ISO 639-1 and 639-2 standards,
> > Serbian and Croatian are two different
> > languages.


I'm sure this happened after the separation of Croatia from Yugoslavia. 
Before that, "Serbo-Croatian" was one of the official languages of that union.

Which I find quite interesting. I read somewhere that the difference 
between a dialect and a separate language often is purely political, not 
linguistic. This makes a lot of sense to me. Picking a nearby example, 
inhabitants of some regions of Sweden speak dialects so thick that other 
Swedes sometimes even claim not to understand them. But it is still Swedish 
for sure - up to the day when one of those regions breaks away to form a 
new, independent country. Which, I might add, doesn't seem very probable in 
the near future, even though a small number of more or less serious 
extremists do exist.

But if it does happen, that new country will immediately adopt the name of 
the former dialect as their official language. They might even, in time, 
decide to spell some words differently to further show their independence. 
Other than that, there will obviously be no difference at all in the way 
the language is used, especially when spoken. Maybe this is a little bit 
like how it happened in Croatia and Bosnia-H, for example?


Another off-topic topic recently discussed: My surname is correctly spelled 
with an Ö, that is, Diös, with the O with the dots. But that letter usually 
didn't go through very well internationally. I don't even know if all 
recipients of this list can read it (or if they care). I do know that some 
of my E-mail correspondents don't receive it, but some code instead. So I 
normally drop the dots whenever writing my name in an international 
context, like below:



Stefan Dios
Malmo, Sweden