Well, they are almost the same, there are some different words and dialects, but they were treated like synonyms (I hope that is spelt correctly, no time to check) and everyone understood them in ex-Yugoslavia. Slovenian and Macedonian are a bit different, but in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro we speak basically the same language. Lately there were some attempts of changing the languages so everyone could be "different" from the others; Croatians changed their language the most, they accepted some old words again and replaced foreign words with their domestic ones, but of course we can still understand them.
I understand all the pain that has happened in your corner of the world in the past 13 years. Still, I feel it is very sad when politicians decide to change a common language and culture. You can remain different political states without cutting your linguistic and cultural ties. All the language and literature produced in all that territory is yours and theirs to share.
My warmest greetings,
Excuse me Sanja for putting your name in my message.
It's ok, Jordi. And I agree. :)
I agree with Dudette.
Any of you guys that think all languages are equally complexed are crazy!
You can't judge the complexity of a Language by the amount of time that a child learns it. A child absorbs his first language differently than an adult learner. He will pick it up just from casual exposure.
That is not normal learning.
That's a form of imprinting.
Compare how long it takes an adult to learn a Language that isn't even in the same family (i.e. Indo-European, Semetic, Nilo-Saharan, Na-Dene,
Altaic, Sino-Tibetan) as his mother language.
You will see huge variations in difficulty based firstly on how different his new language is from the language he already knows, and secondly how large and complex his new language is.
It is obvious that some languages like Russian, chinese and japanese are both larger and more different from English than the common European languages. And there is certain familiarity to start with when learning languages like spanish french and german.
Regards, Paul V.