Speakeasy wrote:Radioclare wrote:My advice would be to learn Serbian (or Croatian) instead, for which there are a lot more resources. I have always been fine speaking Croatian in Montenegro and no one has ever accused me of speaking the wrong language. I always try to avoid using words that are specifically Croatian, as if there is a choice of two words, Montenegrin tends to use the one preferred in Serbia...Daniel N. wrote:I would advise simply learning Croatian (as you will not find many resources for Bosnian and Ijekavian Serbian) and then remembering few specifics. Especially since Montenegrin media seem to prefer in recent years some specifically Croatian forms to the Serbian forms, for obvious reasons. Furthermore, in everyday speech, there are some similar words in Montenegro and coastal regions of Croatia (due to the common Venetian influence).
Yes, that's basically it. If you use something advertised with "Croatian" in the title to learn "Montenegrin", you'll get a closer approximation of the (stereotyped?) Montenegrin accent than with a course advertised as "Serbian" because of the fomer's ijekavianism and still cover 99% +/- 1% of the rest of what you'd need (on a side note, I've never seen any course of ijekavian Serbian for foreigners and what's marketed as "Serbian" to us uses the Belgrade-standard ekavian reflexes).renaissancemedici wrote:As for the political purposes on naming former Yugoslav languages, don't get me started. The saga of Yugoslavia never ends.
I've had the
Colloquial Croatian and Serbian: The Complete Course for Beginners
by Celia Hawkesworth, Iva Jakulic-Ljubisic
for years and it's fine. It has both alphabets, it makes distinctions between "dialects" (I think it says 'dialects') and it gets you started very well.
I've never heared of Montenegrin, I always assumed it is almost identical to Serbian. Different pronunciation doesn't make separate languages I think, judging from Greek which is one language with a party of pronunciations and different words.
PS. Note how the book avoids the controversial term Serbo-Croatian, which is how we used to know the language of the former Yugoslavia. Of course there were so many things we thought we knew but didn't...
Using different pronunciation alone indeed doesn't automatically justify coming up with a separate language (neither does different vocabulary nor even different script; if someone were to play up a difference in script as a way to distinguish languages, then monoglot Serbs must be thought of as bilingual because they can express themselves in writing natively in either Cyrillic or Latinic). The biggest make-or-break point is in grammar and because of how similar the variants' grammar is (cf. Daniel N.'s observation that he finds it tough to distinguish (reliably) a Dubrovnikian Croat from a Montenegrin on language alone), you have to invoke more politics, or absurdly, play-acting to magnify the difference (sounds a bit like a linguistic analogue of this). I recall some nationalist Croat on an internet forum...
Dubrovnik speech vs Montenegrin. In certain cases you need to be deaf to not hear the difference.
Dubrovnik vs Dalmatia. While chunks of Dalmatia were under Venice for centuries the city was an independent Republic. The speech of Dubrovnik has some specifics that differentiate it from the language of Dalmatian cities. Some common local words are of Proto-Slavic, Ragusan Dalmatian or of Florentine/standard Italian origin.