To Sanja:
Dialects are variants of languages (example: Afrikaans is a variant of dutch, that doesn't mean it doesn't have any importance) ,so dialects (or variants ) are equally important ...
To Damian:
The "Active users" Welsh , Irish and Scottish are declining . That's why they are potential endangered languages . ( Look at the percentages of 50 years ago, you will see that the numbers of speakers ( as their 1st language ) diclined dramatically...).Surely there will always be knowledge of the language, thanks to published and unpublished material .
Greetz... ;)
Sanja,
Perhaps Tiste was referring to the Romance language once spoken along the Dalmatian coast:
"Note that the term "Dalmatian" today is often used to refer to the Čakavian-ikavian Croatian dialect spoken in Dalmatia, which includes many words picked up from Italian and even some from German. This dialect and the original Dalmatian language are not related, though, and should not be confused."
to Tiste:
>Dialects are equally important as languages<
I absolutely agree...
"Note that the term "Dalmatian" today is often used to refer to the Čakavian-ikavian Croatian dialect spoken in Dalmatia, which includes many words picked up from Italian and even some from German. This dialect and the original Dalmatian language are not related, though, and should not be confused."
The original romanised Dalmatian language has been extinct for some centuries (replaced by a Slavic dialect, actually), but its traces are probably preserved in some place-names, especially on the islands along the Dalmatian coast: e.g. Supetar or Sumartin at the island of Brac. They are the equivalent of Italian San Pietro or San Martino. Places well worth visiting, by the way. :-)
By way of explanation: ikavian is a very special linguistic term, and refers to the variants of pronunciation of the ancient slavic vowel "yat": the word for "sand" can be pronounced in three ways on the Serbo-Croatian area: as "pesak" (ekavian, mostly in Serbia), as "pijesak", (yekavian, in Bosnia, largest part of Croatia and Montenegro), and as "pisak", (ikavian)in Dalmatia, and incidentally around my native town Subotica, where there are people who migrated centuries ago from the former province of Herzegovina (now forming a single unit with Bosnia, and adjoining Dalmatia).
To Sanja:
"Burgenland Croatian" is the South Slavic dialect spoken in the province of Burgenland (or Gradisce) in Austria by a pocket of speakers (not more than several thousand, if I am correct). These remnants also show that Europe used to be even more diverse in the past centuries than it is now.
>>Dialects are equally important as languages<<
Actually even the standard versions of languages are based on dialects spoken in a particular area, even if they are no more restricted to that area once they become standardised. It can be said that language is a dialect with an army and a flag. And it is not easy to tell where a dialect ends and a language begins. The South Slavic area is a good example of this. Linguistically, there are only dialectal differences between Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, but you'd better not to try telling a Croatian nationalist that Serbs and Croats speak basically the same language (although there are many people who will admit this, even if with some reserve). It's true, there are cultural and historical differences which do make these peoples distinct, but language is not one of these. Quite the same problem with Bulgarian and Macedonian.
Strong dialects can differ more than 60 % of the standard language , did you know that?
I live in Canada and I know plenty of 2nd and 3rd generation Italian-Canadian and Greek-Canadian families that still speak Italian or Greek in their homes as their day-to-day family language. Some of them families haven't even visited the home country in a couple of generations.
The reason that happens is because people enjoy speaking their 'cultural' language. It gives them feelings and lets them describe things they can't get out of English.
>>Strong dialects can differ more than 60 % of the standard language , did you know that?<<
Sorry, I meant 6 % , my bad ;)
Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are DEFINITELY the same language, just different dialects. I think that in some other languages there are even more different dialects and they still consider it as the same language. In ex-Yugoslavia that is mainly a political problem.
Actually, I was taught that, when Serbo-Croat was standardised, they took a dialect from Eastern Herzegovina (very close to where I live) as a standard language, so we speak much more correctly than Dalmatians or some other people in ex-Yugoslavia.
Croatian and Serbian ARE the same language ... it only differs in spelling!
To Gee: Not even that. Everyone in ex-Yugoslavia was supposed to know both alphabets (Roman and Cyrillic). Maybe after the war that is not the case anymore. I still know both of them.
Sanja said: >>Everyone in ex-Yugoslavia was supposed to know both alphabets (Roman and Cyrillic). Maybe after the war that is not the case anymore.<<
There's a funny situation in Serbia. In Vojvodina, in the north, almost everybody writes in Roman script. In Belgrade and parts of Central Serbia it's about fifty-fifty between Cyrilic and Roman (some Belgrade-based newspapers used to print one page in Roman script and the other in Cyrilic, though I don't know if they still do this). Finally, they use almost exclusively Cyrillic in Southern Serbia. By the way, to those who are not familiar, both scripts are phonetic: one letter always corresponds to one sound. But generally most people know both alphabets.
Sanja, has anybody ever considered using Arabic script for Bosnian Moslems? Or is everybody happy with Roman script?
Now I'm kinda confused ... spelled the same ? or not?...
Gee,
In theory you can write all variants in both alphabets (because the sounds are the same), so yes, they are spelled the same. It is a matter of preference which alphabet you use, as I illustrated with examples from Serbia. The main difference between, say, Serbian and Croatian variants is in vocabulary and some minor points of usage, the same way as for e.g. British or American English or Standard Dutch and Flemish.
The above being true, the situation now is that although Croats and for a large parts Serbs also seem to happy with Roman script (with special accents being used for various special sounds, especially fricatives, like in Czech), Cyrillic is increasingly propagated in Serbia and Montenegro (especially the former).