Some friends and me this weekend in Crikvenica, Croatia

“Hello.”  ”Goodbye.”

Politeness is something that a lot of people strive for, and it usually includes greeting people nicely and wishing them well, in some fashion or another.  When you learn a new language, one of the first things you usually want to learn is how to use polite greetings to meet people and ask for information.

For native Bosnian and Croatian speakers, this is one of the obvious areas where their two languages are distinct.  While the Bosnian and Croatian languages are functionally the same language (my respective colleagues in Bosnia and Croatia will strongly disagree, but I stand firm) and natives of the two countries can understand each other perfectly, greetings and salutations are very different, and can’t really be interchanged.  It’s very interesting… » Read the rest of this entry «