Montenegrin

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Wed Jun 16 20:55:41 CEST 2010


From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Milos Rancic

> Treating Serbo-Croatian as a macrolanguage is not quite good solution.
> The term is ambiguous, there is no such thing as "Common Serbo-Croatian 
> language" in the genetic (not prescribed) sense; as well as the majority of 
> domestic population really don't like that term because of various reasons.

Some clarifications are needed here. "The term is ambiguous..." Does that mean that "macrolanguage" is ambiguous, or that "Serbo-Croatian" is ambiguous? 

I gather you mean the latter. Assuming that to be the case, we need to distinguish between the question of whether there is a single "individual language" (i.e., range of language varieties deemed for practical purposes to be one language, different from other languages) and the question of whether (assuming a single language) there is one shared identity for that language. Note, for instance, that entries for individual languages in many cases list multiple names that may be used by different communities (e.g., Asturian / Bable / Leonese / Asturleonese).



Peter


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