[udba]

Certainly the naming of the language as "Serbo-Croatian" or "Croato-Serbian" happened in the Socialist period, but the Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, etc. etc. languages are really variants of a polycentric language [1], whatever you want to call it. For those not from the Balkans, imagine the British, Americans, and Canadians insisting that their versions of English are completely different languages, or making up new words to distance themselves from each other.

Snježana Kordić's book made the case that there is a polycentric language shared by those countries and that much of the current politicking over this topic is nationalist in basis. I think it's easy to see that this bickering over language is yet another useful distraction from the catastrophic state of society and the economy in those lands.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Lang...