of how things develop.

Also interesting: It's almost impossible to find Serbian language books and dictionaries, but lots of "How to learn Croatian".

I think Croatians are more open to the "outside world", they played their cards better, we are just stuck in our little Balkan "schüssel". On the other hand, negative publicity during the '90s did Serbs neither good, nor justice. Some better evolved/developed marketing spirit would come in handy thou, considering the times we are living. This is one reason for which I was shocked but rather pleased to see all those posters advertising Romania in Wien. By the way, out of curiosity, how long is the Romanian row? Need to check it myself next time :).

and you find plenty of books for learning Romanian everywhere.

Will also check the travel section soon.

And while we're on: Perhaps someone could date me up. I learned that no one down there speaks 'Serbocroatian' any more. So I guess, people in Croatia speak Croatian and Serbs speak Serbian now (as well as Slovenians speak Slovenish, I suppose?)

I'd like to know if there is a bigger difference between these languages as between let's say German and Austrian.

put it exactly the way you describe it.

Mainly why I was looking for books that teach me Serbian, was that I need units on cyrillic spelling. And you don't that in teaching material for Croatian.

thou you can use both for Serbian, while you can only use latin spelling for Croatian. With Serbian it is only a matter of "how you grew up with": I was taught to write cyrillic, so almost unbelivably, I am quite unable to use latin while writing Serbian. But I find no difficulty of course to use latin for the other languages I use... And yes, the differences are the more or less the same as for Austrian and German, or, say, Romanian and the newly invented Moldavian...

My Bosnian colleague told me that when he was in school, they would alternate weeks between cyrillic and latin. Amazingly, they taught him that, but not a single thing about Muslim culture. He asked me, an American, what Halal meant. No wonder Mostar remains divided.

told me the same - the alternating weeks, I mean.