The Serbo-Croatian Language
The Serbo-Croatian Language

Author(s): George Rapall Noyes
Subject(s): South Slavic Languages
Published by: CEEOL Collections / Digital Reproductions
Summary/Abstract: THE SERBO-CROATIAN LANGUAGE belongs to a group of languages united by certain common characteristics and called the Slavic languages. The Slavs, be it said at once, are not at present a race or a nation; they are merely of individuals who speak Slavic languages. So the governmental and literary language of the United States is English, but English is the only mother tongue of millions of Negroes and thousands of American Indians and Chinese and Japanese who dwell within our borders. Nor is there any reason to think that the Slavs ever formed a race. Race is a word so difficult to define that some ethnologists have given up the attempt in despair; there are few, if any, unmixed races in the world, and no branch of the Slavs belongs to any one of the possible few. But it is probable that at the opening of the Christian era there was only one Slavic language, which the philologists call for convenience Primitive Slavic, and that, like the ancient Greeks, the speakers of it formed, in a broad sense of the term, a nation: that is, a people united by common customs and beliefs as well as by a common language, and conscious of their own unity.

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