Cases where several nations speak the same language are treated in linguistics as pluricentric languages. - Snježana Kordić

Who wants to be a linguist must apply consistently linguistic criteria, not tinkering to comply with policy needs, creating the illusion that one stands still in the field of science.

The long-form endings have pushed away the short-form endings completely in the oblique cases. In the last few years, there are attempts in Croatia to bring back again the short forms in the usage. This attempts are the part of the new sociolinguistic politics to bring back the archaic words and forms in the usage and to construct new words, neologisms, in place of customary words - all that with the aim to make the language in the west of the Serbo-Croatian language community as different as possible from the language in the east of the Serbo-Croatian language community. Leaders of the new language politics proclaim as incorrect what was customary, and as correct what was rare, archaic or even did not exist in the usage, and then they carry it out in practice through the control of the media, text-books etc. Such inversion of the criteria for what is correct and what is not correct in the language usage makes the native speakers unsure and frustrated.

Fälle, in denen mehrere Nationen eine Sprache sprechen, werden in der Sprachwissenschaft als plurizentrische Sprachen behandelt.