EUobserver reports that Croatian will be accepted as a complete language in-and-of-itself, completely separate from Serbian. These two languages have different scripts but Serbo-Croatian is effectively one spoken language. Given that the entire Western Balkans are expected to eventually join the EU sooner or later, we can look forward to EU translators and interpreters having to get everything to and from Slovenian (already an EU language), Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Macedonian (close to Bulgarian) and even perhaps Montenegrin (from a country which until recently was considered part of Serbia).
Admittedly the symbol can be important to legitimizing a nation’s sense of selfhood. I just hope in practice we don’t have the interpreters’ booths crowded with Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin at the same time for the sake of showing how very, very distinct they are from each other.
Letters from Europe 
Pingback: Croatian Languages