On 7/12/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
I have been asked to advocate for the creation of a Zlatiborian Wikipedia.
I am a native speaker of the Serbian language (actually, I would say that I speak Serbocroatian, but many can take that as a political statement. Let's just say that my native language class in school was called "The Serbian language") from Belgrade, and I would like to give my two cents on this.
I think that further balkanization of Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian etc. Wikipedias is just silly. The differences pointed out here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Node_ue#Differences_between_Zlatibori...
.. may only go as far as Ijekavian vs. Ekavian. The difference is that in some words, "e" is substituted by "ije" or "je" (or the other way around of course). For example, mleko becomes mlijeko. "Ja mnogo volim mleko" would become "Ja mnogo volim mlijeko".
Some people in Serbia use Ijekavian, while the majority uses Ekavian. But, the fact is, we can understand each other perfectly well. We all listen to music, watch movies, possibly read books, etc. that use the dialect which we don't use personally, and of course, we communicate with people who speak in a different dialect, on daily bases. There are no problems to this whatsoever. I say tomato you say tomato, with added colour vs. color spelling difference kind of thing.
Pronunciation of words is different (different stresses, accent, etc.), but so is between people from Belgrade and people from Novi Sad, or New York and San Francisco (when I first went to New York, I couldn't understand anything, but they still spoke English and after a few hours, I got a hold of it).
As far as vocabulary differences pointed out on that page, that's just silly. All of these words are really synonyms in the Serbian language, and by no means are a set of words exclusive to certain regions. There are words in colloquial speech used in different parts of the country that are exclusive to one region, but it pretty much comes down to "soda" vs. "pop".
If you assume that all contributors to Wikipedia are literate people, who didn't spend their life in communicating only to their parents, then you can assume that a person from Zlatibor has no problems whatsoever communicating with people from Belgrade, and vice versa. It's one language! If two editors can't agree on whether to use, e.g. "regija" or "oblast" (example given in that link), then they are pushing such a strong POV that both of them should be banned for life from editing and possibly locked up with a key being thrown in an especially deep river.
Creating Zlatiborian Wikipedia would be... well, like creating a separate Wikipedia for New Zealand... Actually, no. Like creating a new edition for Wellington, New Zealand.
Dejan
P.S. I have to admit that I have never been to Zlatibor, but it is a popular tourist destination for people from Serbia, so many of my friends and relatives went there at one point. Friends told me about their skiing accidents, but never ever has somebody mentioned anything about the way locals speak. This is the first time that I hear of it.