Serbo-Croatian language

Views of Croatian linguists

A prevailing view among Croatian linguists is that there has never been a Serbo-Croatian language, but rather two different standard languages that overlapped sometime in the course of history. However, Croatian linguist Snježana Kordić led an academic discussion on this issue in the Croatian journal Književna republika from 2001 to 2010. The editor of that magazine says: "I encouraged prominent Croatian linguists to respond to her. However, after a while it became obvious to everyone that Kordić was superior in the discussions". In the discussion, she shows that linguistic criteria such as mutual intelligibility, the huge overlap in the linguistic system, and the same dialect basis of the standard language are evidence that Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin are four national variants of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language. In 2010, Croatian writer Igor Mandić described the debate as "the longest, most thorough, and most incisive polemic [...] in 21st-century Croatian culture". Inspired by that discussion, a monograph on language and nationalism was published in 2010.