Naš jezik

There’s an article in The Economist this week about how Serbocroatian is being revived in a fashion under the label of naš jezik (“our language”).

It’s really an interesting linguistic situation in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. Even within one country, it seems that more than one variant is used. For instance, if one goes to the Serbian Wikipedia, one can view each page in four variants by using the selectors on top called ????, ??????, ekav and ijekav, or in other words, one can choose between two alphabets and two linguistic variants, the latter choice being whether a river is called reka (a form often associated with Serbian) or rijeka (a form more often associated with Croatian); the variant rika is not included here, so presumably that is not allowed in Serbian.