I'm not a linguist but I think it would be useful to have a unifying term for these languages. If I say that I speak 4 languages at a native level, referring to the languages listed in the parent post, it's not exactly the same (to put it mildly) as someone speaking Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Czech at a native level, even if these languages too come from the same family.
As an anecdote, a friend once told me, that to really speak a language you must be able to understand jokes and poetry in that language. I tend to agree. With that in mind it's worth mentioning that to a great extent people from Serbia, Croatia, BH, and Montenegro listen to the same music, read the same literature, and tell the same jokes
Wikipedia calls them all Serbo-Croatian [1], more or less:
> Serbo-Croatian – also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin.
There's also some story about how these all derive from Shtokavian via Eastern Herzegovinian, so those might be useful names too.
And, of course, how could we forget the Balkan sprachbund [2]!
In the article, Weinreich presents this statement as a remark of an auditor at a lecture series given between 13 December 1943 and 12 June 1944:
A teacher at a Bronx high school once appeared among the auditors. He had come to America as a child and the entire time had never heard that Yiddish had a history and could also serve for higher matters.... Once after a lecture he approached me and asked, 'What is the difference between a dialect and language?' I thought that the maskilic contempt had affected him, and tried to lead him to the right path, but he interrupted me: 'I know that, but I will give you a better definition. A language is a dialect with an army and navy.' From that very time I made sure to remember that I must convey this wonderful formulation of the social plight of Yiddish to a large audience.
As an anecdote, a friend once told me, that to really speak a language you must be able to understand jokes and poetry in that language. I tend to agree. With that in mind it's worth mentioning that to a great extent people from Serbia, Croatia, BH, and Montenegro listen to the same music, read the same literature, and tell the same jokes