So as a resident of the cluster of political nonsense known as the Balkans and a native Serbian speaker, I've spent my whole life talking to Croatians, Bosnians, and Montenegrins, watching their movies and TV shows, reading their books and similar stuff. The catch is, I don't speak Croatian, Bosnian or Montenegrin, or at least I don't think I do. I speak Serbian. I've never learned these languages, but as a Serbian speaker I understand them perfectly, and those people understand me. In fact, as a Serbian speaker from the north, I'm way more likely to understand a Croatian speaker from Zagreb or Slavonia than a fellow Serbian speaker from the deep south! How does that make any sense?!
I've spent all my childhood wondering why these languages are considered separate, when they are nearly exactly the same. Now I understand that in this exact example politics have made irreversible change to the language family, but there is a ton of examples of very intelligible languages being named separately, and some official "dialects" of one language being very tough to understand for standard or different dialect speakers of that same language. For example, why is Venetian a separate language to Italian or Galician to Spanish, but Swiss German and Latin American Spanish are just dialects of German and Spanish? Why are a Moroccan and an Iraqi both native speakers Arabic, if they are likely to have pretty significant difficulties talking to each other due to how different their dialects are?
What do you think? Do you sometimes disagree with the official definitions? To be honest, to me Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin will always be the same language, even if they are spoken by different nations. Where do you draw the line on what you consider a language or a dialect?
