"just a greater Serbia"

sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cestna_afera
dnevnik.si/1042467052
mladina.si/48684/o-politicni-dediscini-staneta-kavcica/

What im always confused about is why yogoslavs didnt just try to create a new language to unify all the groups. Something that used a bit of every language. To my understanding there was some who saw the benefit of a unified yogoslavia but surely theyd have realised an unified country with diffrent languages would never be truly unified.

That did happen though. Pretty much everyone learned serb Croatian, including Slovenes Macedonians and Albanians.

Tito did same for Croatian Home Guard.
Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro speak same language, Macedonia and Slovenia mostly knew Serbo-Croatian. Language wasn't an issue.

Do you mean serb croatian as in it was some combination of serbian and croatian or everyone just learned serbian and croatian languages? Because learning both languages would be pretty useless if the aim was to unify the nation. Its nice as a token of goodwill but it wont unify the country over the long run. Though if the meant the first, then im glad they were at least trying to unify.

Standard Serbian and Croatian are same language, divided for political purposes. Serbs call it Serbian and Croats call it Croatian. Same with ''Montenegrin'' and ''Bosnian''.
There are some dialects that are kinda different but overwhelming majority uses standard language.

Serbian and Croatian was mutually standardized in the 19th century and from there spread to the non Croat/non serb parts of Yugoslavia, slovenes, Macedonians and Albanians learned it in the public school system as a lingua franca.

Well now i feel stupid, thanks for explaining.

Correction, we didn't learn it in public schools, we learned it from TV and magazines, and many southerns Macedonians still can't speak Serbian

r u sure

Ye

I find it hard to believe every backwoods kosovar and slovene of all ages learned serbo Croat exclusively from magazines and tv

As I said, backwoods Macedonians didn't, I imagine backwoods shqiptars and Slovenes didn't either

Serbs can't rule themselves

So what did Macedonians do when they were drafted into the JNA? According to my dad every backwoods Albanian farm boy was super fluent in serbo Croatian when he spent time in the JNA, are you absolutely sure serbo Croatian instruction wasn't provided in school? Every person from the former Yugoslavia above the age of 40 I meet seems to have a functioning grasp of it, no matter what the ethnicity.

100% sure.

It's not like they were writing doctoral theses in the army, basic Serbo-Croatian would be learned in a week or so.

Well people seems to have a much more than basic grasp of it, especially Albanians, if my dad was able to get English instruction in a backwoods farm school in the late 60s in central Hercegovina there's no way some amount of serbo Croatian wasnt taught in areas of Yugoslavia that weren't natively serb or Croat.

To add:
Serbo-Croatian is based on the Štokavian Eastern Herzegovinian dialect.
The name "Štokavian" means that the word for "what" is "što" or "šta". This contrasts with Kajkavian and Čakavian, which are spoken in parts of Croatia, whose words for what are "kaj" and "ča", respectively.
Kajkavian is closer to Slovene than Štokavian, arguably.

Štokavian itself has 3 "accents", spoken in different areas, that are distinguished by a certain vowel, called the "yat".
Ekavian - it's "e", so the word "time" is vreme. This is spoken in Serbia, and I think near Vukovar, in far-eastern Croatia (correct me if this is wrong)
Ijekavian - it's "ije" or sometimes "je", so the word for "time" is vrijeme. This is spoken in most of Bosnia and parts of Croatia. Standard Croatian and Bosnian both use this. This is also a way to distinguish Bosnian Serbs and Serbian Serbs. Bosnian Serbs use Ijekavian, while Serbian Serbs use Ekavian.
Ikavian - it's "i" - so the word for "time" is vrime. This is spoken in Dalmatia and parts of Bosnia.

I don't know about the other republics but I can assure you that there were no Serbian lessons in schools what so ever, and all we know comes from shows and magazines, as well as mutual intelligibility (I learned to communicate perfectly with a Bulgarian in just 2 days)

I'd like to add that you can cherry pick certain words to make them seem more distant than they are.
Tomato - paradajz - rajcica
Garlic - beli luk - cesnjak
Bread - (h)leb* - kruh
The H sound wasn't used in the past in central Serbia prior to the spelling reform. And an interesting tidbit as a Serbian saying (or manner of speech) "Trbuhom za kruhom", meaning The belly follows the bread, generally referring to people migrating or choosing a harder job that pays better.
Also, Croats prefer to use Home instead of house, which is Dom, while Serbs prefer to use House over home, which is Kuća. Paradoxically a housewife in Croatia is a Kucanica, and in Serbia a Domacica

Yugoslavia should be an italian vassal

Nice way to introduce an even higher degree of lawlessness

and so what
id like to see yugoslavia as the new wild west

Thing about all those different words is that most of them are known to everyone, we just use others more regularly. Sometimes they are used in a different context.
For example if you ask a Montenegrin where he is people (from southern part) will usually say "doma" instead of "kući", a part of onion is "češanj luka", and so on. Outside of some remote villages in Zagorje every Serb will understand Croat perfectly.

Both Monte niggeria and Herzegovina should be glassed desu

I understand that Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians split into different ethnic groups because of their different religions; but what makes the Slovenes any different from the Croats, and the Montenegrins from the Serbs?

Well the divide between the croats and Slovenes is rather large since there is a legit linguistic divide. Montenegro was a very mountainous region that was independent both of Ottoman and "proper" serbian rule for a very long time full of basically mountain serbs, though arguably the distinction between Serbs and Montenegrins is much smaller than the one between slovenes and Croats. Also Montenegro has a lot of supposedly slavicised Albanians although I am not an expert and cannot go into this.