the division of Serbo-Croatian into Čakavian, Štokavian and Kajkavian is traditional(-ish), and broadly reflective of how the language’s speakers have historically distinguished its varieties – that is, in Croatia, which is the only country where all three dialects are natively spoken. some of the specific isoglosses that separate the three are pretty old, but the dialects themselves coalesced relatively recently – and they were only allowed to coalesce through demographic engineering. linguistic developments within South Slavic naturally exist on a gradient, and wherever borders do appear, they emerged through the suppression of transitional varieties.
there is no way to delineate South Slavic varieties natively spoken by Serbs and Croats (et. al.) from those spoken by Slovenians, and no way to delineate varieties spoken by Serbs from those spoken by Croats, without making the resulting groupings paraphyletic. Kajkavian exists on an unbroken continuum with eastern varieties of Slovenian, and both of them share multiple traits in common with central dialects of Slovak – formally classified as a West Slavic language. northern Čakavian is transitional with littoral varieties of Slovene, and Štokavian is a complete mess internally.
the reason why this is seems pretty obvious to me – we were stateless peoples until recently, and there was never an opportunity for us to flatten our internal linguistic diversity into something resembling national languages. (that is, until we didn’t start displacing ourselves instead of letting other nations do the displacing for us.) for what it’s worth, I don’t think there’s much use in insisting on a common term for what are today distinct national varieties even if they are, as a consequence of historic happenstance, all based on the same dialect. I personally happen to quite like how there’s more diversity within Serbian and Croatian than there is between the two languages.
(the comparison of Kajkavian with Scots only works if Croatia is supposed to stand for Scotland, in which case I suppose Serbia would stand in for England – though Štokavian displaced Kajkavian in Croatia well before the unification of Croatian lands with Serbia. in fact, official usage of Štokavian in Croatia proper predates even the adoption of Štokavian as it is spoken in Eastern Herzegovina as the basis for literary Croatian.)
(if I were forced at gunpoint to salvage the term “Serbo-Croatian”, I’d probably reserve it for those South Slavic varieties that merged Proto-Slavic strong yers *ŭ * ĭ as /a/, and vocalised syllabic /ClC/ (from earlier *CŭlC *CĭlC) to /u/. this grouping includes all of Štokavian, central and southern varieties of Čakavian, and varieties of Torlakian native to Serbia. it’s not an ethnically meaningful grouping, as it excludes those ethnic Croats who speak Kajkavian and northern Čakavian, but it does include the dialect Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian-Montenegrin are all based on. this is because, fundamentally, what makes one a Serb or Croat has very little to do with language.)
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
titsay
