Did Yugoslavia ever have a common language?
820111
No.  The best description of "Yugoslavia" is "That part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which did not speak either German or Hungarian".  In other words, everything else, which was a group of Slavic languages and a bit of Albanian.\n\nEDIT:  Skb, how can you disagree with me?  You said EXACTLY the same thing I did, "Yugoslavia never had a common language, it was a pot of several different languages".  LOL.  I guess you never heard of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and don't know the history of the region before and just after World War I, so in that case, you may not understand my comment on the matter.
630823
Where to start?  Let's limit this to the former Yugoslavia since the term 'Balkan' could potentially apply to neighboring areas as well.  Also, there have been numerous Balkan conflicts in history, so I'll assume you mean the most recent series of the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s.  \n\nFirst, note that there is not any current armed conflict in the Balkans today.  The last major outbreak of war was in 1999 when the US and NATO bombed Serbia in an effort to stop violent repression of the Kosovar/Albanian population in Kosovo.  But there are budding autonomy or independence movements elsewhere, including in Montenegro, a part of present day Serbia-Montenegro.\n\nPreviously in the 1990's the State of Yugoslavia broke up into various parts, more or less away from the central authority dominated by Serbia, sometimes with violent wars.  Slovenia broke away without violence.  But Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina saw protracted periods of violent unrest and civil war in the early-mid 1990s.  Macedonia broke away with comparatively little violence.  And now Kosovo, after a bloody, but short uprising and war in '99 is officially still part of Serbia-Montenegro, but is more or less independent and there is talk of a final settlement which would make Kosovo formally independent.
537342
Yes.\n\nIn Wales about 15% of the population speak Welsh as a first or equal first language.  Most scoolchildren in Wales have to learn Welsh.\n\nIn Ireland, Irish Gaelic is spoken - particularly in the Western areas.\n\nIn Brittany (North Western France), Breton is spoken by a sizeable minority as a first language alongside French.\n\nIn Scotland - paricularly the Western Isles and Western Highlands - Scots Gaelic is spoken by a - diminishing - minority.\n\nManx is surviving as a second (learned) language but has no real mother tongue speakers on the Isle of Man.\nThe same applies to Cornish.\n\nCumbrian is to all intents and purposes extinct and survives in a few ancient texts only.\n\nNumerous other celtic languages - from as far afield as present-day Turkey and Spain are long dead.\n\n'Britain' is a celtic name from the original celtic (sometimes referred to as British) language spoken throughout the British Isles before the Roman conquest in the first century A.D.
263235
no but i do know that its the state language of karnataka. i went to a wedding in madikeri a few years ago. india is beautiful.
91986
I learned there are about 6000 human languages.\nNot counted: dead languages.\nThe number of dialects is hard to count, because the differences are too vague.When you guess five in each language then you find 30 thousend.
492759
when I speak to Bulgarians, Slovenians an Macedonians we all speak our own languages, and we understand each other.\n\nwhy would we use English which is a totally different language from ours?\n\nbut of course, I can understand Bulgarian not speak it, and it's very important to use simplified language and not talk very fast.. Written test I can understand perfectly.\n\nthose are the most similar Slavic languages and we "share" many words and expressions
442126
To answer this you must first know a little about the history of Yugoslavia.... \n\nYugoslavia only came into existence after world war 2.\nBefore that roughly the same area was called the kingdom of the Serbs, Slovenes and Croats. This only existed after the first world war.\nBefore that Serbia and Croatia, and Bosnia etc had separate histories and cultural influences. Serbia was under the Ottoman empire whilst Croatia was under the Austro-Hungarian.\nSome people say that Yugoslavia only stayed together because of Tito's firm grip. Tito died in 1980. In the 1980's Yugoslavia economy first started showing the signs of strain that had already existed but were hidden well by Tito's position in the world, and Yugoslavia prestige of not being neither West or East.\nThis was the time when nationalist tensions first became to show (they had appeared before but were dealt with efficiently by Tito -- both Tudjman and Izabegovic 1st presidents of modern Croatia and Bosnia respectively had spent time in prison for nationalism)\nBy the times of the late 80's , Yugoslavia was ready to fall apart... \nNationalism was everywhere..\nIn Serbia started by a nationalist memorandum in 1986 by intellectuals... \nBy 1989 (a then new) Milosevic had removed autonomy from Kosovo and Vojvodina...\nThrough out Europe communism was falling, and people were wanting changes of government.\nSlovenia first wanted indepence. Partly because it was the richest province in Yugoslavia and was sick of seeing it's money spent on poorer areas. Partly because it was wanted to be more democratic and was worried by Milosevic's pro Serb, and neo communistic tendencies....\n\nSo when Slovenia declared indepence it was impossible for Croatia not to as well... Croatia had a strong natioanlist history lead by it's leader Tudjman. And wanted to regain 1000 years of Croatian history.\nIf Slovenia and Croatia were both accepted as independent by the EU , which they were..\nIt was impossble for Bosnia to stay in Yugoslavia...\n\nBUT.. \n\nThey were many Serbs who lived in all areas of the former Yugoslavia especially Croatia and Bosnia...\nThey did not want to leave Yugoslavia, and wanted to stay with Serbia...\nThey were also scared of nationalism in Croatia because during the second world many Croats were supporter of the Ustasa who were supporters of Hitler. The ustasa had massacered many Serbs in death camps such as Jasenovic.\nSome modern Croats were sympathisers with the Ustase and some of the decisions made by Tudjman gave Serbs a reason to fear living in an Independent Croatia.....\nWhilst in Bosnia alot of nationalist propganda brought to the forefront a hate of Islam, and of the Ottoman past..\n\nThis is why the civil war happened....\nOf course now relations are much better between all countries and current politicans are trying to make ammends for the past and build a future.
667377
Arabic is the most common language, the official language of all North African countries (which are often considered part of the Middle East), along with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the sheikdoms surrounding it.  Turkish is the official language of Turkey.  Farsi is the official language of Iran.  Hebrew and Arabic are co-official languages of Israel.\n\nIn addition, there are many minority languages.  Berber languages are spoken in parts of North Africa.  Coptic is the liturgical language of Egypt's Copts (a persecuted Christian minority).  French is spoken by large numbers of people in Algeria and Lebanon.  There are Spanish speakers in Morocco.  And Kurdish is spoken by Kurds in a number of countries (Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq).  Israel has significant numbers of English and Russian speakers.  Just to name a few.
14917
There are 20 official languages of the EU: Danish, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Maltese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Czech, German and Hungarian.\nThe original document from 1958 had four: Dutch French, German and Italian. To this list has been added the new member states: 1973 Denmark and UK, 1981 Greece, 1986 Spain and Portugal, 1995 Sweden and Finland, 2004 the rest, mainly former "Eastern European" countries and Malta\nFrom January 1st 2007, Irish will be added to that list, making a total of 21
569082
No, no, no. Especially not with history. Look into WW2 for more on that. They definitely have  two totally different languages. Their cultures are a lot different.\n\nIn a nutshell, they are not really related at all.
732100
Austria and Russia were heavily populated by minorities.  Austria-Hungary was less than 50% German and Hungarian.  Many areas such as Bosnia, Bukowina and Silesia that did not even have any ethnic majority.  In Austria, the country tried to accommodate languages and cultures by allowing the people the ability to carry on their own traditions.  The Russian approach was to surpress nationalities and require instruction in Russian.\n\nDuring WW I both countries were in part undermined by the nationalities.  The fuse itself, Serbian terrorism, was out of a desire to create a Southern Slav nation.
426721
All European languages except Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque belong to the Indo-European language family.  A number of Indian languages such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Singhalese and Punjabi also belong to this family.\n\nWithin this family there are other smaller groups.  Latin, Romanian, French, Italian and Spanish belong to a group known as 'Romance' - after the Romans.  Over time these languages have influenced and borrowed from eachother.  English belongs to the Germanic group - but has borrowed extensively also from Latin and French.\n\nOther groups are 'Germanic' (Dutch, English, Swedish ...), 'Slavic' (Russian, Bulgarian ...), 'Celtic' (Welsh, Breton, Cornish ...).  Some languages are Indo-European but in groups of their own - such as Albanian and Greek.\n\nIt is often wrongly asserted that French, Italian etc. 'grew out of' Latin.  This is based on the false assumption that because Latin is 'dead', that it must somehow be the 'root'.  Actually, Latin and other Romance languages all developed from the same or similar roots.\n\nLanguages can be likened to species - as they diverge geographically (and politically etc.), they diverge structurally, too.  So, in the same way that humans did not evolve FROM Chimpanzees (but evolved from the same common ancestors AS chimpanzees), French evolved from the same roots as Latin did.
641741
As I'm sure you know of course the OFFICIAL LANGUAGE OF SLOVENIA IS SLOVENIAN !!!!  It is a Slavic language and in my opinion something between Serbian and Czech.\n\nAround the border there are bilingual areas with Hungarian or Italian...\n\nAnybody older than 25 will speak Serbian / Croatian because Slovenia used to be in Yugoslavia...\n\n\nENGLISH IS VERY WIDELY SPOKEN especially amongst the young..\n(Let me give you an example...I went to the cinema in a small town in Slovenia to watch some American comedy..and the whole audience  were commenting and joking with themselves about the film in ENGLISH!)\n\n\nAt school As the first foreign language, English or German may be studied, with English chosen in 85 % of cases and a share of 15 % for German. The languages offered as second foreign language are German, French, Spanish, English, Russian, and Italian. In bilingual areas, Slovene, Italian and Hungarian are also taught as second languages.
558621
not but here is what wikipedia has to say about it \nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%B6k_stone\nacording to it , it is a Swedish and Danish dialect .
1039868
As a linguist, it is very difficult to trace back whether humanity was once speaking one single language. Babel belongs to the bible, but not in a linguistics course.\n\nIf we go back 8-10,000 years ago, there seems to be a trend in thinking that there were maybe less languages around. At least that would have been the case for Indo-European: there was no English, no German, no French, no Welsh, no Russian, no Hindi, no Albanian, no Greek, no Latin - there was only Proto-Indi-European (*IE) from which linguists can trace the evolution of *IE to English, for instance.\n\nThe reason why there are so many languages is because humanity is mobile: altough some people settle somewhere, there's always one group that moves away. After a while, their speech changes and can adapt to the speech of the people that already live in the new place.\n\nThere is a clear trend at the moment that English is becoming the international language, which means that that is the language that people using one language will use to speak to another group of speakers (lingua franca). However, this does not mean that English will take over all the other languages.
219528
Im also a serbian.Ko to kaze ko to laze Srbija je mala.\nNije mala nije mala triput ratovala!:)
1019293
ti si odlican....that is in Serbian :)