On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 06:30:04PM -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the attempts of "translation".
You recall wrongly. A similar incident is described at en:Differences in the official languages in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia or whatsitcalled, but there was never a law requiring subtitling anything.
With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions created by linguists for political purposes.
It is actually awkward for us in .hr to listen to foreign words, accent and style, regardless of how similar they are to our words, accent or style, and the consensus is that we shouldn't have to do it. Nothing more, nothing less.
The country didn't collectively hire linguists to invent words, and then hire gorillas to force four million people to stop using old words and use the invented ones. That simply never happened, not by a long shot. There were politicians and linguists who had an agenda of modifying their speech and the speech of others, but their influence has always been finite, and generally minor.
Recent nationalism has caused many outsiders to treat Croatians as some sort of excessively xenophobic people who now go out of their way to be different. However, the way we speak, and how that is different from the people in Serbia, dates much further back than the creation of the Croatian state. We have always spoken a bit differently, hence the variance in Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian. The official sanction of a Croatian language is merely a different type of an acknowledgement of the existing situation, not an attempt to construe something out of thin air.