Croatian alphabet costs money

The Croatian alphabet has a number of diacritic marks that modify the pronunciation of a letter. Or better: a letter with a diacritic mark is a separate letter by itself. The letters are often transcribed in translations, so that the word četnik becomes chetnik, ustaša ustasha, Jelačić Jellachich (in older books), and so on. The Jelačić-Jellachich case shows the problem of transliteration. There is no combination of English letters that can express the difference between ć and č. It's fair to say that the difference is small, and that many young Croats frequently mix them up. Serbs swear there is an audible difference between ć and č, but Croats are more relaxed about it. Other such letters are š, đ and ž. One of my favorite words is učvršćenje. Words without diacritic marks can be difficult to pronounce too, as strpljiv shows.
Computers and SMS servers cannot always deal with these letters. If you send an SMS containing the word šunka your mobile will convert it into shunka and proceed the message to the server. The server sends it to the recipient's phone, which in turn converts shunka to šunka. Anyone who can count sees that shunka has one letter more than šunka. And that is the heart of the matter. One SMS can contain 160 characters. So, if you have used up all your characters for one SMS and click send, you will pay for two text messages. Transliteration makes words longer, so you can cross the 160 character limit without knowing it.
I searched a bit in Wikipedia and learned that many more languages use letters with diacritic marks. Sending text messages in Czech should be very expensive, as that language has the following letters: á é í ó ú ý č ď ě ň ř š ť ž ů.
As a matter of fact, not many Croats use diacritic marks in text messages. They simply write sunka or, if they are purists, shunka. Teletext doesn't use diacritic marks either, although I don't quite understand why. Maybe teletext is considered so twentieth century that no one cares.
Serbs also transliterate (or: phoneticize) the other way around, a very annoying habit if I may say so and confusing at first sight. Who the hell are Vilijam Batler Jejts, Džordž Bernard Šo and Vinston Čerčil? Hint: all won the Nobel prize in Literature.

Death of a language

At Interliber, the annual international (Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro are present too) book fair in Zagreb, the book Language and Identity in the Balkans by Robert David Greenberg attracted my attention. I did not buy it, but decided to borrow it from the Zagreb public library. It doesn't have the original English (or should I say: American?) version, but it did have a Croatian translation. At least today we call it a Croatian translation. Earlier translations would enter libraries with the language code "serbocroatian", but that is history.
Pointing out that the differences, in spelling or pronunciation, between Serbian and Croatian are next to nothing compared to the variety you can find in German, Dutch, French or English makes no sense. Also, the three Croatian dialects (štokavian, kajkavian and čakavian) differ much more from each other than standard Croatian differs from standard Serbian. But who cares about science? It's all a matter of identity. Some people believe in extraterrestrial life, others in a language - fine with me. Serbo-Croatian is dead (except on Wikipedia) or simply never existed. The pencil strokes and question marks in Greenberg's book suggest that the previous reader was of that opinion.
Maybe that person is right. When I visited Montenegro, I spoke Croatian with the lady that sold me an ice cream. She said: "You speak nice Serbian". I felt very proud, but at the same time I wondered: Who is crazy here? If the lady listens to her government, next time she should tell me: "You speak nice Montenegrin". My CV is getting longer and longer.