Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its Disintegration

Language rifts in the Balkans are endemic and have long been both a symptom of ethnic animosity and a cause for inflaming it. But the break-up of the Serbo-Croatian language into four languages on the path towards mutual unintelligibility within a decade is, by any previous standard of linguistic behaviour, extraordinary. Robert Greenberg describes how it happened.

Day by Day: The Nineties

The Persian Gulf War and the end of the cold war; the invention of the World Wide Web and the introduction of the Euro currency; the launching of the Hubble space telescope and "Dolly," the cloned sheep; the repeal of apartheid in South Africa and nuclear weapons tests in India and Pakistan; ethnic violence in the Balkans and genocide in Rwanda—these and other momentous events defined the last decade of the 20th century.