Montenegrin

[Leif Halvard Silli]

Milos Rancic, Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:20:42 +0200:
> On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 17:12, CE Whitehead wrote:
 ...
>> an alternate name for Serbian and the tag sr-ME -- as suggested --
>> would be o.k. for me too.
> 
> Formally, this can work, as "Serbian written according to standards of
> Montenegro" doesn't exist. Actually, to be strict, it exists, but
> there are just *three* different words (I remember two words of thre:
> "sjutra" instead of "sutra" [=tomorrow] and "medjed" instead of
> "medvjed" [=bear]) from the standard Serbian Iyekavian; but three
> words don't create a separate standard.

Much about Serbian here ... But, at least, in the following paragraph 
you provide some information about Montenegrin:

> This is opposite to
> Montenegrin standard, which has three different phonemes and probably
> hundreds of differently spelled and pronounced words.

Hundreds of words are also not many. 

On Saturday, you made a case for how different Montenegrin is:

> Milos Rancic, Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:10:21 +0200:
>> Contrary, about relation of Montenegrin and Serbian, it is not about
>> dialects, it is about standard languages. Standard Montenegrin, as
>> defined during 2009 has three distinctive phonemes. And it is more
>> distant linguistically from Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian than they
>> are between themselves.

According to some, however, those phonemes are just allophones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montenegrin_language#cite_ref-8

Looking at the Wikipedia text about the Montenegrin alphabet, they 
indeed comes across as allophones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montenegrin_alphabet#Additions

According to the first article, «The official web page of the President 
of Montenegro states that it is provided in "Montenegrin–Serbian 
version" (Crnogorsko-srpska verzija).»
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montenegrin_language#cite_ref-9
http://www.google.no/search?hl=en&q=Crnogorsko-srpska+site%3Apredsjednik.me

Thus, I get the impression that the President of Montenegro refers to 
Montenegrin as Montenegrin-Serbian. Which is an argument for 
identifying the it as a variant of Serbian.

Another Wikipedia article discusses the Zeta-South Sandžak diealect, 
which is a dialect of the eastern half of Montenegro (including the 
capital) and concludes: "Currently the Montenegrin language is 
undergoing a standardization process which will be somewhat based on 
the Zeta subdialect."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtokavian_dialect#Zeta-South_Sand.C5.BEak

To the extent that is is based on a Montenegrin specific dialect, then 
I can understand the claim that Montenegrin is more different from 
Serbian/Croat/Bosnian than Serbian/Croat/Bosnian differ between them. 
May be an argument for a separate primary language subtag for 
Montenegrin.

Regarding the argument for a separate code versus simply using 'sr-ME', 
you said:

Milos Rancic, Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:20:42 +0200:
> But, it would be much better to have a separate code.

Why would it be much better? 

And why not have a variant subtag, so that one could write something 
like "sr-montenegrin" or "sr-crnogorsko"?

Another place you said this - although you qualified it with a 
'usually':
Milos Rancic, Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:10:21 +0200:
> Marking some text as sr_BA or sr_ME is usually a nonsense as there are
> not different written varieties of standard Serbian for Serbia, Bosnia
> and Montenegro.

You also said about "sr-ME" that «Formally, this can work». And, if it 
is nonsense to use 'sr-ME' about about "Standard Serbian as used in 
Montenegro" (since there are only 3 distinguishing words), then it 
*does* seems possible to use 'sr-ME' about "Montenegrin". 

But from another angle, it seems to me that this could lead to problems 
with regard to localization. E.g. if Mozilla wants to provide both a 
Montenegrin variant of Firefox as well as a Serbian variant  of Firefox 
for their users living in Montenegro. (Wikipedia says that 63.49% 
"speak the Serbian language of the Iyekavian dialect", while 43% 
identify them as Montenegrins.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montenegro#Language 

Another problem is that it would not be forbidden to use "sr-ME" about 
"Standard Serbian as used in Montenegro" - because there are no 
absolute rules about which region subtags that may come after the 
primary language subtag. (E.g. "sr-GL" [Greenland Serbian] is perfectly 
valid - 
http://rishida.net/utils/subtags/index.php?check=sr-GL&submit=Check ) 
And, also, in a Serbian text, you *could* also use exactly "sr-ME" 
around the 3 words by which "Standard Serbian as used in Montenegro" 
differs from "Serbian Serbian".

Therefore, to me it seems like, yes, there is a need for a tag to 
identify Standard Montenegrin. However, it seems like a variant subtag 
could be enough for that purpose.
-- 
leif halvard silli