Montenegrin

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 19:29, CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail.com> wrote:
> According to,
> http://www.montenegro.org/language.html
> "Montenegrins speak and write Montenegrin. It is sociolinguistically,
> ethnically, and culturally a separate language. For example, the Montenegrin
> language has 33 letters while Serbian and Croatian each have 30. "

While I am in favor of recognizing Montenegrin, those are arguments
are just partially true. Differences between speeches in Montenegro of
those who are smaller than differences between, let's say, Bosnian,
Serbian and Croatian in Sarajevo (they tend to use a couple of dozens
of different terms, nothing more).

* ~1/3 of Montenegrins by ethnicity say that their native language is Serbian.
* ~1/2 or Montenegrins by nationality say that their native language
is Serbian, which is more than 2/5 of those who say that their native
language is Montenegrin.
* In other words, dominant ethnicity of Montenegro is Montenegrin, but
dominant standard language is Serbian.
* There are no cultural differences. All of the Montenegro literature
is treated as both Serbian and Montenegrin. Actually, if Montenegrin
is defined by their 3 more phonemes, all Montenegrin literature
(except a couple of exceptions) was written in standard Serbian.
Besides the fact that all significant writers declared that they were
using Serbian or Serbo-Croatian.
* Just sociolinguistic differences in the sense of prescribed language
(which includes phonological differences, too) and political arguing.

But, as I described it previously, if Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian
are recognized as separate languages, Montenegrin should be, too.

> There are no language tags for any of the content in any language at the
> following URL:
> http://www.gov.me/en/homepage
> http://www.gov.me/naslovna?alphabet=lat
> (I'd love it if someone would help identify whether the content identified
> above is Montenegrin.)

Actually, it is still standard Serbian: "predsjedavajućeg" should be
"predśedavajućeg", if I am introduced well. However, it has been
prescribed as "Montenegrin", not as Serbian.

> Nor at the following -- which I would guess to be in Montenegrin:
> http://www.montenegrina.net/

Inconclusive. No "ś" and "ź", but no relevant combination "sj" and "zj".

> So my guess is that much content is untagged but I do not know.
>
> I suppose that hr-Latn-ME
> and hr-Latn-ME

There are speakers of Croatian in Montenegro, too.