Encyclopedia Britannica's take on Serbo-Croatian. Excerpts from the free 1911 edition, on the article on Servia[1]:
The Serbs (Srbi, as they call themselves) are a Slavonic nation, ethnically and by language the same as the Croats (Hrvati, Horvati, Croati). The Croats, however, are Roman Catholics and use the Latin alphabet, while the Serbs belong to the Orthodox Church and use the Cyrillic alphabet, augmented by special signs for the special sounds of the Serb language.
There can be no doubt that in the south-eastern group of the Slavonic languages Serbo-Croatian and Slovene form a special closely-connected group, in which the Servian and the Croat languages are almost identical. Both the Servians and the Croats arrived in the first half of the 7th century (or more precisely about A.D. 635) in the northwestern corner of the Balkan Peninsula. There they met the partly Romanized Illyrians, and in course of time absorbed them. There can be little doubt that this absorption softened and enriched the Serbo-Croatian dialects, a process to which climatic conditions and intercourse with Italy also contributed, until Serbo-Croatian became one of the richest and most melodious of Slavonic languages.
To facilitate this reform, to overcome the ecclesiastical prejudices of the Roman Catholic Croats against the Eastern Orthodox Servians, and vice versa, certain Croatian patriots, led by Ljudevit Gaj, proposed that all the Slavonic peoples in the north-western part of the Balkan Peninsula should call themselves Illyri and their language Illyrian. The appellation "Serbo-Croatian" for the literary language of both nations now finds more favour. The great dictionary compiled and published by the South Slavonic Academy of Agram is called The Lexicon of the Servian or Croatian Language. Although the Croats write and print in Latin characters, while the Servians write and print in Cyrillic, and although many a Servian cannot read Croatian books, and vice versa, the literary language of both nations is one and the same.
Croats and Serbs together constitute a single branch of the Slavonic race, frequently called the Serbo-Croatian branch. The literary language of the two nations is identical, but the Croats use the Latin alphabet, while the Serbs prefer a modified form of the Cyrillic. The two nations have also been politically separated since the 7th century, if not for a longer period; but this division has produced little difference of character or physical type. Even the costume of the Croatian peasantry, to whom brilliant colours and intricate embroideries are always dear, proclaims their racial identity with the Serbs; their songs, dances and musical instruments, the chief part of their customs and folk-lore, their whole manner of life, so little changed by its closer contact with Western civilization, may be studied in Servia (q.v.) itself. In both countries rural society was based on the old-fashioned household community, or zadruga, which still survives in the territories that formed the Military Frontier, though everywhere tending to disappear and be replaced by individual ownership.
The Orthodox Serbs, moreover, use a modified form of the Cyrillic alphabet, while the Roman Catholic Croats use Latin characters, except in a few liturgical books which are written in the ancient Glagolitic script. As the literary language of both nations is now practically the same, and is, indeed, commonly known as "SerboCroatian"..
The the modern day, 2009, issue of Britannica only has an article on Serbo-Croatian language, and not on any individual languages emerged in the 1990s[3]:
South Slavic language that is the native language of most speakers in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia. It historically served as an important secondary language in Slovenia and Macedonia. The Croats, who are Roman Catholic and who lived for centuries under Venetian or Austro-Hungarian rule, and the Serbs, who are Eastern Orthodox in religion and who, after a short period of independence, lived for five centuries under Turkish domination, have adopted distinct standard (literary) forms, Croatian and Serbian; with the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Bosnian form must also be recognized. Vocabulary and pronunciation differences exist among the three but form no real barrier to communication. The Croats and Bosnians use the Roman, or Latin, alphabet; the Serbs and Montenegrins use Cyrillic.
From the article on Bosnia and Herzegovina (pretty-much the same thing can be found on the articles on Croatia and Serbia): [4]:
The mother tongue of the vast majority is the Serbo-Croatian language, but it is now known as Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian, depending on the speaker’s ethnic and political affiliation. There are some minor regional variations in pronunciation and vocabulary, but all variations spoken within Bosnia and Herzegovina are more similar to one another than they are to, for example, the speech of Belgrade (Serbia) or Zagreb (Croatia). A Latin and a Cyrillic alphabet exist, and both have been taught in schools and used in the press, but the rise of nationalism in the 1990s prompted a Serb alignment with Cyrillic and a Croat and Bosniac alignment with the Latin alphabet.
