О језику Срба, Хрвата, Муслимана и Црногораца
In the region extending from the Croatian-Slovenian border on the northwest to the Serbian borders with Macedonia and Bulgaria on the southeast, a range of South Slavic dialects in spoken. These are grouped by Slavicists into a number of dialect groups forming the close genetic-linguistic unity referred to as the Croato-Serbian language or, entirely synonymously, as the Serbo-Croatian language. These are not the happiest of terms, for several reasons. But since there are no better ones, or at least none name the language in this sense, whether we are thinking of it as a descendant of the Proto-Slavic or Proto-Indo-European language, or as one of the (Balto) Slavic, (West) South Slavic, (Central) European, Balkan, or Mediterranean languages, for it is in fact all of these. In light of this fact we can simply refer to the standard language which has developed on the basis of the Croat-Serbian linguistic sources as Croat-Serbian (or, it goes without saying, by the completely synonymous term Serbo-Croatian), without regard to which manifest variant it appears as. But owing to its various traditions, and to the different possible focuses of attention in specific contexts, the use of other terms for the standard language may be justified, particularly if not in a strict terminological sense. There have been persistent demands recently for the terms Serbo-Croatian and Croat-Serbian to be adopted or prescribed as the only possible, the only justified, the only allowable, or suchlike terms. This only gives rise to needless suspicions and speculations as to the motives for such insistence, while the real questions relevant to the science of language and language culture remain unilluminated.
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