Re: Language environments

[Richard Stallman]

     doesn't mention Serbo-Croatian (which IMO was a political
    fiction of the past).

The name was artificial, but the language is real.  The political
fiction is the present-day idea that Serbian and Croatian are two
different languages.  The Croatian nationalists did not want to share
a language with Serbia, so they said that Croatian was a different
language.  That doesn't match the linguistic facts.  There are
variations of dialect in the language, but they do not match the
national boundaries--each major dialect appears in more than one
nation, and each nation has more than one of the major dialects.

Around 1996 the Croatian government sought to hire some Croats to
"translate" Serbian into Croatian, but the applicants failed the test.
The government's artificial labeling of words and expressions as
"Croatian" or "Serbian" did not match the actual speech of Croatians,
which was still Serbo-Croatian.

The language is now often called Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.