title: Snowtown murders

text: The trial of Bunting and Wagner lasted almost twelve months, the longest in the history of South Australia. In December 2003, Bunting was convicted of committing eleven murders, and Wagner of ten murders, of which he had confessed to only three. Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four of the murders. In 2004, Haydon was convicted on five counts of assisting with the murders (of which he admitted to two). The jury did not come to a decision on two murder charges against Haydon, and another charge of assisting murder, at which the senior prosecutor, Wendy Abraham, indicated that she would seek a retrial on those charges. The final count against Bunting and Wagner—that of murdering Suzanne Allen—was dropped on 7 May 2007, when a jury had been unable to reach a verdict.


title: Snowtown murders

text: Justice Brian Ross Martin determined that Bunting was the ringleader, and sentenced him to 11 consecutive terms of life imprisonment without the possibility of release on parole. Wagner was sentenced to 10 consecutive terms under the same conditions, and at his sentencing, he stated from the dock: "Paedophiles were doing terrible things to children. The authorities didn't do anything about it. I decided to take action. I took that action. Thank you." Vlassakis was sentenced to four consecutive life sentences with a non-parole period of 26 years and Haydon was sentenced to 25 years with non-parole period of 18 years.


title: Snowtown murders

text: More than 250 suppression orders prevented publication of the details of this case. In early 2011, a judge lifted the remaining orders in response to a request by the producers of the film "Snowtown", a dramatisation depicting the murders and the events leading up to them.


title: Snowtown murders

text: Several individuals were involved in the murders: John Bunting, Robert Wagner and Mark Haydon were all charged with the killings; additionally, James Vlassakis pleaded guilty to four murders and provided testimony in exchange for a lesser sentence.


title: Snowtown murders

text: John Justin Bunting (born 4 September 1966 in Inala, Queensland) was found to be the leader of the perpetrators. When he was 8 years old, Bunting was beaten and sexually assaulted by a friend's older brother. He is reported to have "enjoyed weaponry, photography and anatomy," and grew to develop a strong hatred of paedophiles and homosexuals. At age 22, Bunting worked at an abattoir and reportedly "bragged about slaughtering the animals, saying that's what he enjoyed the most". Bunting moved to a house in Salisbury North, South Australia in 1991 and befriended his neighbours Mark Haydon and Robert Wagner.


title: Snowtown murders

text: Robert Joe Wagner (born 28 November 1971 in Parramatta, New South Wales) was befriended by Bunting in 1991. Bunting encouraged Wagner to assist in the various murders.


title: Snowtown murders

text: James "Jamie" Spyridon Vlassakis (born 24 December 1979), along with his mother and half-brother, lived with Bunting and was gradually drawn into helping with the murders. Vlassakis, 23, helped torture and kill his own half-brother, Troy Youde, and his stepbrother, David Johnson. He confessed in 2001 to four murders, including Johnson's, and became a key witness for the Crown. The detail he provided, supported by other evidence, helped convict Bunting and Wagner. Vlassakis was sentenced in 2002 to a minimum of 26 years and is held in isolation in an unidentified South Australia prison.


title: Snowtown murders

text: Mark Ray Haydon (born 4 December 1958), an associate of Bunting, was initially the subject of "suppression orders or statutory provisions prohibiting publication" and could not therefore be identified as anything other than an alleged perpetrator. In January 1999, he reportedly rented the abandoned state bank building at Snowtown. A jury deadlocked on the murders of Haydon's wife, Elizabeth Haydon, and of Troy Youde. The murder charges were not retried when Haydon pleaded guilty to helping the serial killers dispose of the bodies of Elizabeth and Youde.


title: Snowtown murders

text: The notoriety of the murders led to a short-term economic boost from tourists visiting Snowtown, but created a lasting stigma. "The Age" reported in 2011 that Snowtown would be "forever stigmatised" due to its association with the murders. Shortly after the discovery of the bodies in Snowtown, the community discussed changing the name to "Rosetown", but no further actions were taken. , one shop in Snowtown was selling souvenirs of the murders "cashing in on Snowtown's unfortunate notoriety".


title: Snowtown murders

text: The house in Salisbury North where Bunting lived and buried two bodies was demolished by its owner, the South Australian Housing Trust. The other place in Murray Bridge has been sold. The bank, with a four-bedroom attached house, was placed on auction in February 2012 but only reached half its reserve price of $200,000. After holding an open house which raised $700 for charity through charging an entrance fee, the property sold later that year on 27 September for just over $185,000 with the new owners intending to live in the house while running a business from the bank. A plaque will be installed to commemorate the victims.


title: Snowtown murders

text: "Snowtown", also known as "The Snowtown Murders", a feature film based upon the life of John Bunting, was released in Australia on 19 May 2011.


title: Snowtown murders

text: Australian comedian Eddie Perfect wrote a demo song for "Snowtown the Musical" intended to be screened at the 2011 "Inside Film Awards" that he was hosting. The song was not broadcast.


title: Snowtown murders

text: Jason Whalley and Lindsay McDougall of punk band Frenzal Rhomb formed a short lived acoustic band named Self Righteous Brothers, releasing an album in 2005 containing the song 'There's No Town Like Snowtown'.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: Mad Season was an American rock supergroup formed in 1994 as a side project of members of other bands in the Seattle grunge scene. The band's principal members included guitarist Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, lead singer Layne Staley of Alice in Chains, drummer Barrett Martin of Screaming Trees, and bassist John Baker Saunders. Mad Season released only one album, "Above", in March 1995. Its first single, "River of Deceit", was a radio success, and "Above" was certified a gold record by the RIAA in June.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: The band went on a semi-permanent hiatus in 1996 due to the band members' conflicting schedules and Staley's problems with substance abuse. Attempts were made in the late 1990s to revive the group without Staley, and material for a follow-up release to "Above" had been worked on; however, the band dissolved following the death of bassist John Baker Saunders in 1999 from a drug overdose. Staley also died of a drug overdose three years later. Martin and McCready have since made two short partial reunions, one in 2012 and one from 2014 to 2015. A special edition box set containing a remastered edition of "Above" and various unreleased material was released in March 2013. Mark Lanegan – who contributed vocals to "Above" (as well as lyrics to one of its tracks "Long Gone Day"), and had temporarily replaced Staley during the late 1990s – died on February 22, 2022.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: During the production of 1994's "Vitalogy", Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready went into drug and alcohol rehab at the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota, where he met bassist John Baker Saunders. In 1994, when the two returned to Seattle, Washington, they formed a side band with drummer Barrett Martin. McCready played in bands such as Pearl Jam and Temple of the Dog, Martin with Skin Yard and the Screaming Trees and Saunders with blues talents such as Little Pat Rushing, Hubert Sumlin, Sammy Fender, and The Lamont Cranston Band. Immediately the trio set up rehearsal time together and wrote the music for two songs that would later become Mad Season's "Wake Up" and "River of Deceit", both of which would later appear on the band's album "Above". McCready then brought in friend and Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley to round out the line-up. McCready had hoped that being around sober musicians would push Staley to get himself sober.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: Despite not having a single song completely prepared (only beginnings of songs, according to Martin) and not even having a name for the band, McCready scheduled an unannounced show at the Crocodile Cafe on October 12, 1994, which turned out to be a big success. The song "Artificial Red", which was also to appear on the album, actually came together during the show itself. Two more gigs were scheduled (November 6 & 20, 1994) at the same venue, with the band calling itself The Gacy Bunch, after both the notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy of Chicago and the 1970s sitcom The Brady Bunch. On January 8, 1995, the band made an appearance on Pearl Jam's "Self-Pollution" satellite radio broadcast, a four-and-a-half-hour-long pirate broadcast out of Seattle which was available to any radio stations that wanted to carry it, performing "Lifeless Dead" and "I Don't Know Anything".


title: Mad Season (band)

text: After gaining more popularity, the band recorded its only album and changed its name to Mad Season, which is an English term for the time of the year when psilocybin mushrooms are in full bloom, and a term which McCready related to "the seasons of drinking and drug abuse." The album, "Above", which was recorded in Seattle, Washington at Bad Animals Studio (co-owned by Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart) and co-produced by the band and Pearl Jam sound engineer Brett Eliason, featured ten songs. It also included guest vocals and additional lyrics by Screaming Trees frontman and solo artist Mark Lanegan. McCready said, "We did all the Mad Season music in about seven days. It took Layne just a few more days to finish his vocals, which was intense since we only rehearsed twice and did four shows." The album was released on March 14, 1995 through Columbia Records to critical and commercial success. Over the course of 1995, "Above" scaled the "Billboard" 200, eventually peaking at No. 24 and spawning two singles: "River of Deceit" (#2 Mainstream Rock Tracks, No. 9 Modern Rock Tracks) and "I Don't Know Anything" (#20 Mainstream Rock Tracks). "Above" was certified gold on June 14, 1995.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: The band continued to play shows during the spring of 1995 before going on hiatus so that the members could return to work with their main bands. During this time the band released the "Live at the Moore" concert film, which was a live performance recorded at Seattle's Moore Theatre on April 29, 1995. Also, during this time the band contributed a cover of John Lennon's "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier" to the 1995 John Lennon tribute album, "". In 1996, a live version of "River of Deceit" surfaced on the "Bite Back: Live at Crocodile Cafe" compilation album, although by this time Mad Season had long been dormant from live work as McCready and Martin went back to work with their respective bands and Saunders joined The Walkabouts.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: In 1997, attempts were made by McCready, Saunders and Martin to revive Mad Season, although by this point Staley's health had worsened due to severe drug addiction; he would never perform again after a July 1996 Alice in Chains show. As a result, Mad Season was without a singer. With Staley now out of the picture, the band recruited vocalist Mark Lanegan (of the Screaming Trees), who had previously guested on the "Above" album (as well as at live shows) as its new permanent singer. With the switch in frontmen the group also switched names adopting the Disinformation moniker in late 1997.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: Work reportedly began in 1998 on what would have been Disinformation's debut album, although between everyone's busy schedules, it became difficult to meet in the studio together. Over the course of the year the quartet gradually grew apart, making a Disinformation album all the more unlikely. Another critical blow was dealt to the project in January 1999 with the death of bassist John Baker Saunders from an overdose of heroin. The group (especially Saunders' long-time friend Mike McCready) was deeply saddened to hear news of his death. Although no official announcement by the band was ever given, Staley confirmed in July 1999 (during an Alice in Chains interview) that the group had disbanded.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: Following Saunders' death, McCready returned to working and touring with Pearl Jam and also later formed a new side project, The Rockfords. Martin briefly returned to work with Screaming Trees before the band disbanded in 2000. Since then Martin has worked as an occasional touring drummer for R.E.M. and performs with R.E.M guitarist Peter Buck in the band Tuatara. Staley briefly reunited with Alice in Chains in the late 1990s before dropping out of the public eye permanently. His body was later found on April 19, 2002 in his condominium, the victim of an apparent overdose of cocaine and heroin about two weeks prior. Lanegan went on to a relatively successful solo career, worked with Queens of the Stone Age, and performed with Isobel Campbell on the 2006 Mercury Prize nominated album, "Ballad of the Broken Seas", and as part of a duo with Greg Dulli under the name The Gutter Twins.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: On February 28, 2010, McCready performed at the "Hootenanny For Haiti" at the Showbox at the Market in Seattle along with the likes of Velvet Revolver, Loaded and former Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Fastbacks bassist Kim Warnick, and former Alien Crime Syndicate, Sirens Sister and Vendetta Red bassist Jeff Rouse as well as Truly and former Screaming Trees drummer Mark Pickerel among others. A number of songs were covered during the show, including Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth", Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", and the Rolling Stones' "Dead Flowers" among others however one of the more notable moments came when McCready performed "River of Deceit" for the first time since the breakup of Mad Season with Jeff Rouse performing vocal duties on the song.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: Lanegan died on February 22, 2022 at his home in Killarney, Ireland, making him the third member or songwriter/contributor of Mad Season to have died.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: On May 23, 2012, the surviving members of Mad Season (Mike McCready and Barrett Martin) reunited at the Showbox Theatre in Seattle for Mike's annual benefit concert for Crohn's disease. They were joined by Loaded singer Jeff Rouse and The Rockfords bassist Rick Friel.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: In 2012 Barrett Martin, Mike McCready and Duff McKagan, along with singer Jeff Angell and keyboardist Benjamin Anderson collaborated on an album called "Walking Papers". Spurred by this collaboration, Martin, McCready and McKagan revisited the unreleased Mad Season material. In July 2012, Barrett Martin confirmed that Mark Lanegan would be singing several songs on a new Mad Season release.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: Legacy Recordings released an expanded deluxe edition of "Above" in April 2013. A three-disc boxset comprising two CDs and one DVD, it includes a digitally remastered version of the studio album, the John Lennon cover "I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier", some unreleased tracks from the band's unfinished second album with lyrics and vocals by Mark Lanegan, the band's "Live at the Moore" performance on April 29, 1995 on CD, DVD, and vinyl, and a previously unreleased full concert video of the band's New Year's Eve performance from the now-defunct Seattle club RKCNDY.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: Mad Season reunited again for a special concert titled "Sonic Evolution" with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra on January 30, 2015 at Benaroya Hall in Seattle. At this show, Chris Cornell filled in for Staley on vocals, and Duff McKagan filled in for Saunders on bass. Kim Virant of Lazy Susan and Jeff Angell of Walking Papers also provided vocals at the gig. The concert was recorded for the live album Mad Season & The Seattle Symphony - "Sonic Evolution / January 30, 2015 / Benaroya Hall" and was released August 28, 2015. The album debuted at number four on the Billboard Top Classical Crossover Albums chart.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: In July 2015, Barrett Martin announced on Facebook that he was recording new Mad Season material with Mike McCready and Duff McKagan. The fruits of the collaboration resulted in a project called The Levee Walkers, which released the songs "Freedom Song" and "Tears for the West" in 2016 with singer Jaz Coleman and the song "All Things Fade Away" in 2017 with singer Ayron Jones.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: McCready described the songs on the band's only album, "Above", as "some jazzy stuff, some blues, some arena rock." Before his review was revised, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic said that the album "sounds like a cross between Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam, taking the ponderous seriousness of Alice and PJ's '90s update of winding '70s guitar rock." Staley's lyrics dealt with his personal troubles, with Martin saying, "Layne Staley felt as though he was on a spiritual mission through his music." During the lyric writing process, Staley was reading the book "The Prophet" by Kahlil Gibran, which was a strong influence on the lyrics and the overall tone of the album. "I Don't Know Anything" is a heavier, blues-influenced track, while "Long Gone Day" takes considerable jazz influence, combining the use of samba-style bass, xylophone, and saxophone.


title: Mad Season (band)

text: Staley is credited for writing all the lyrics on the original release within the liner notes of the 2013 deluxe issue. As was the case with much of his work with Alice in Chains, Staley's lyrics dealt with his struggle against addiction as well as other personal troubles. Lyrically, much of "River of Deceit" was inspired by Khalil Gibran's "The Prophet". Vocalist Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees contributes guest vocals on "I'm Above" and "Long Gone Day"; he is also credited for co-writing the music to those tracks along with McCready and Martin. Lanegan also wrote the lyrics for the three bonus tracks on Disc 1 of the deluxe issue - "Locomotive", "Black Book of Fear", and "Slip Away". R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck is credited for co-writing the music to "Black Book of Fear" along with McCready, Martin, Saunders, and Lanegan.


title: Great White

text: Great White is an American rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1977. The band peaked with several albums during the mid-to-late 1980s, including the platinum-selling records "Once Bitten" (1987) and "...Twice Shy" (1989), and those albums' singles "Rock Me" and "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" received considerable airplay through radio and MTV. They charted two Top 40 hit singles on the "Billboard" Hot 100, with "Once Bitten, Twice Shy" and "The Angel Song." They continued to release new material into the 1990s.


title: Great White

text: Great White broke up in 2001. The next few years, the band performed as Jack Russell's Great White, which also made headlines when, in 2003, their show pyrotechnics set a Rhode Island nightclub on fire, leading to the deaths of 100 people, including band member Ty Longley. By 2006, Jack Russell's Great White had reverted its name to its original name Great White. After more than three decades as their singer, Russell left the band in 2011, again using the moniker Jack Russell's Great White. Great White has since continued on without Russell, who was first replaced by XYZ vocalist Terry Ilous, who stayed in the band until 2018 when Mitch Malloy replaced him. Malloy left four years later and was replaced by Andrew Freeman.


title: Great White

text: Vocalist Jack Russell met guitarist Mark Kendall in 1977, and Kendall asked Russell to join his band. They decided to form a band together and they called it Highway later changing it to Livewire and then played one final show as Wires. Then in 1979, Russell was arrested for shooting a live-in maid in a botched robbery attempt, and sentenced to eight years in prison. The band went its separate ways and Kendall was left to start over. He recruited bassist Don Costa (later a one-time member of Ozzy Osbourne and also briefly in W.A.S.P.) and drummer Tony Richards (later a member of W.A.S.P.). They auditioned several singers including John Bush from Armored Saint, They then got a singer named Butch Say whose style was similar to that of Rob Halford, but finally settling on a female singer Lisa Baker. The name they decided to go with was Dante Fox. They played their first gig in 1979 with singer Lisa Baker and played around Orange County and the Los Angeles area for six months with Lisa, until she joined George Lynch's band Xciter and Butch rejoined briefly. Later they found out that Russell was released from prison after serving only 18 months of his sentence and Russell talked Kendall into an audition and he got in the band by a two to one band vote. They played their first gig with Russell at The Troubadour in Hollywood, California.


title: Great White

text: After recording several demos, the band chose as manager Alan Niven, who had worked for the independent distributor Greenworld in Torrance, California and had dealt with Mötley Crüe's debut self-release. Niven suggested the name change from Dante Fox after seeing Kendall stick his head out of a car window while driving by the Troubador and some kid in the crowd said "there goes Great White". Kendall got the nickname due to his naturally white-blonde hair, white Fender Telecaster guitar, white jumpsuit, and white Capezio shoes. In 1982, the members by this time (as Costa and Richards had left) were Mark Kendall, Jack Russell, drummer Gary Holland, and bassist Lorne Black. They were soon in the studio and they recorded and released a 5-song EP, "Out of the Night", on the independent label Aegean formed by Niven. Niven then convinced the Los Angeles radio station KMET to begin adding songs from the EP to its playlist in heavy rotation. KLOS-FM soon did the same. The band suddenly went from drawing 100 people to a local club to drawing thousands in L.A. concert halls such as Perkins Palace in Pasadena, The Palace in Hollywood and the Country Club in Reseda. As an unsigned act, Great White headlined at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia playing to 6,250 people. Near the end of 1983, EMI America signed the band and subsequently released Great White's eponymous debut album in early 1984. The band immediately toured the UK supporting Whitesnake's "Slide It In" tour and the entire US and Canada opening for Judas Priest's "Defenders of the Faith" tour. They also supported Kiss on their "Lick It Up" tour. "Shot in the Dark", their follow-up independent release, marked the arrival of drummer Audie Desbrow after the firing of Holland on December 27, 1984. By the time Capitol Records signed the band and reissued "Shot in the Dark", keyboardist-guitarist Michael Lardie, who had played on that album as a session musician, had come aboard as a full member. After the release of "Shot in the Dark", Great White hit the road with Dokken for 5 shows and was on the verge of even bigger success.


title: Great White

text: The band hit the mainstream in 1987 when they released their third album "Once Bitten", accompanied by the hits "Rock Me", "Save Your Love" and "Lady Red Light", all of which received significant airplay on mainstream rock radio stations such as KNAC and Z Rock. The model Tracy Martinson appeared on the cover of the album and also appeared in the video for "Save Your Love". In late 1987, Great White parted ways with bassist Lorne Black and replaced him with Tony Montana (Tony Cardenas). "Once Bitten..." was certified platinum in April 1988, and a year-long tour in support of the album cemented Great White's popularity worldwide, performing with Guns N' Roses, Twisted Sister, Whitesnake, David Lee Roth and TNT, and appearing on several dates as part the European Monsters of Rock tour in the summer of 1988 with several acts such as Kiss, Iron Maiden, Guns N' Roses, David Lee Roth, Megadeth, Helloween, Anthrax and Testament.


title: Great White

text: The band followed up with "...Twice Shy" in 1989. The album included their biggest hit, "Once Bitten, Twice Shy", a cover of a UK hit single by Ian Hunter; this is Great White's only single to date that has achieved gold certification. The model Bobbie Brown (also known for being in Warrant's "Cherry Pie" video) appeared in the video for "Once Bitten, Twice Shy". Other songs from the album, including "The Angel Song", "House of Broken Love", "Mista Bone" and "Move It", received significant attention as well, through radio airplay or otherwise. "...Twice Shy" was certified platinum in July 1989, then double platinum in September two months later, and received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance. The album was supported by a successful world tour that saw Great White performing at arenas and stadiums, including sharing the stage with Bon Jovi, Ratt, Tesla, Kix, Warrant, Badlands and Britny Fox, and supporting Alice Cooper on his "Trash" tour.


title: Great White

text: In 1990, the band featured in the heavy metal video series "Hard 'N' Heavy" containing music, concert footage and interviews. The video included Slash and Duff from Guns N' Roses appearing with the band at a Children of the Night Benefit concert in L.A., the performance helping to raise money for housing abused homeless children. Both bands shared the same manager, Alan Niven, at the time.


title: Great White

text: The band continued into the next decade performing the song "House of Broken Love" at the American Music Awards in January 1990. In March, Great White embarked on their first tour of Japan. They returned to the United States for the Memorial Day weekend festival dubbed The World Series of Rock, which featured Whitesnake, Skid Row, Bad English, and Hericane Alice. Great White recorded two more albums for Capitol Records, "Hooked", which was certified gold, and "Psycho City". In support of "Hooked", Great White did a tour as opener for the German metal band Scorpions and traveled to Europe and Japan. During this tour Mark Kendall was hospitalized for a hiatal hernia for 3 weeks and then returned. Guitarist Al Pitrelli was asked to fill in for Mark during his absence. "Psycho City" was followed by a US tour with Kiss.


title: Great White

text: Capitol issued the compilation "" in 1993, when Great White had already departed the label to begin work on their next studio release, "Sail Away". Before the release of the album, Great White spent seven months on the road headlining clubs. According to Lardie, it was "the longest stint we ever did without a break". Great White kept up the pace once "Sail Away" was released on Zoo Records in 1994, touring the US several times over the following year and a half. Their next release, "Let It Rock", was released in 1996 through yet another label, Imago Records.


title: Great White

text: In 1999, the band released "Can't Get There from Here" and embarked on a tour with Ratt, Poison, and L.A. Guns. The album featured the single "Rollin' Stoned", which managed to chart at No. 8 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.


title: Great White

text: In a memo dated January 20, 2000, Mark Kendall announced he was taking a hiatus from Great White. Shortly thereafter both Audie Desbrow and Sean McNabb left Great White. Russell continued to tour with guitarist Matthew Johnson. Desbrow, clearly very unhappy with the financial state of the band and Russell's addiction problems, posted a tirade on his website lambasting Jack Russell while claiming to have been "fired" from Great White. Meanwhile, it was rumored that Sean McNabb was fired for going to management and asking to see the accounting books, but the truth was, he was policing Russell's drug use and Jack wasn't into it. The band announced plans to begin work on a new album in late 2000. Early in the process, some of the new songs were played for John Kalodner at Columbia Records. It was mutually agreed that the band needed a break and wanted to do outside projects. Kendall went on to make two solo albums, and Russell also made a solo record. They subsequently left Columbia Records, curtailing any further work on the new album. On November 5, 2001, Jack Russell announced the end of Great White, stating that he was moving on, and that Great White would play one final farewell show on December 31, 2001, at the Galaxy Theatre in Santa Ana, CA. Both Kendall and McNabb rejoined the band for the farewell show, recorded for a live CD titled "Thank You...Goodnight!" released by Knight Records. The live album includes two new tracks, "Back to the Rhythm" and "Play On" from their discontinued studio sessions, both of which would ultimately wind up on their reunion album "Back to the Rhythm" in 2007.


title: Great White

text: By late 2002, his music now considered stylistically passe, Jack Russell contacted Kendall, who himself was struggling with irrelevancy. Kendall agreed to play some dates with Russell's band, allowing Russell to use the name Jack Russell's Great White once again. Billed as Jack Russell's Great White, the tour was to consist primarily of classic songs from the Great White catalog with some of Russell's solo work mixed in. Eventually, more dates were added and the tour extended through the early months of 2003.


title: Great White

text: The band returned to the national spotlight on February 20, 2003. At the beginning of a Great White performance at The Station night club in Rhode Island, pyrotechnics used by the band's crew created a spray of sparks that ignited the makeshift and unapproved or listed foam soundproofing material affixed to the walls and ceiling around the stage. The unapproved or listed makeshift soundproofing material was installed to help alleviate area neighbor noise complaints prior to the fire. One hundred people, including guitarist Ty Longley, died in the fire that followed. Approximately 115 survivors were badly burned, maimed and permanently disfigured. In 2008, Jack Russell Touring INC., agreed to pay $1 million to survivors and victims' relatives of the fire while admitting to no wrongdoing. This amount also covers former tour manager Daniel Biechele along with the band members, record label, and management as it existed at the time of the fire. The settlement was the maximum allowed under the band's insurance plan. On the two-year anniversary of the fire, Jack Russell and Mark Kendall, along with Jack Russell's attorney, Ed McPherson, appeared on "Larry King Live" with three of the victims of the fire and the father of Ty Longley, to discuss some of the healing that had taken place over the previous two years and some of the permanent scars that remained. Victims had previously received $3.8 million raised by United Way of America.


title: Great White

text: Though the media referred to the band as Great White following the tragedy in Rhode Island, the band was officially performing under the moniker of Jack Russell's Great White at the time of the incident. Prior to the fire, the band's official website posted a message stating that Great White had not re-formed. It's unclear when the band began officially going by "Great White" again.


title: Great White

text: Great White played their first full show following the Rhode Island tragedy on July 22, starting a benefit tour for the survivors and victims of the fire. The band toured until 2005 to raise funds for the Station Family Fund, which had been set up to help the victims of the tragedy. In late 2005, citing "medical reasons", the band canceled the second half of their summer tour. The "medical reasons" turned out to be Jack Russell's addictions to alcohol and cocaine. This was the end of this version of Great White, as Jack Russell entered rehabilitation and did not perform again until 2007. Russell used the year of 2006 to get sober and get a facelift that was detailed on ExtraTV. Russell later referred to this incarnation of Great White as "Fake White", saying "It still sounded like Great White, but not – almost like we were doing a cover of ourselves."


title: Great White

text: Talk of a reunion of Great White began in a 2004 interview, where Jack Russell told Metal Express Radio: "I spoke with Michael [Lardie], we threw that around a bit, and thought that sounds like a cool idea, it'd be fun. I'm pretty positive it's gonna happen... probably next year ... We talked to some other people, and [former drummer] Audie [Desbrow] would not be a person I would want to play with ever again in my life. There were some bridges burned there that I just can't forgive, and I'm a very forgiving person. I just can't let that one go. I have to stand up for myself..." Russell's stance towards Desbrow seemed to have changed course by 2006 when he told Mitch Lafon: "I talked to Michael Lardie the other day and he is into doing it. I just want to get hold of Tony Montana and Audie Desbrow. I think that would be very special for our 25th anniversary tour to have the same guys... we haven't played together in a very long time." Later in 2006, guitarist Mark Kendall officially announced that Great White had re-formed its classic lineup. The re-formed lineup of Russell, Kendall, Lardie, McNabb and Desbrow (four of five members of the classic lineup) played their first date together in more than 5 years on January 27, 2007, at the Keyclub in Hollywood performing in the Harpseals.org Benefit Concert for the Seals 2007. The band continued to tour throughout the rest of the year.


title: Great White

text: In 2008, bassist Sean McNabb left Great White to concentrate on a career in theater and acting. McNabb was promptly replaced with Scott Snyder (Ramos, Accomplice). McNabb is now a member of Dokken.


title: Great White

text: Great White released their album, "Rising", on March 13, 2009, in Europe via Frontiers Records and on April 21 in the US.


title: Great White

text: In 2010, Jani Lane of Warrant filled in for Jack Russell, while Russell recuperated from surgery after suffering a perforated bowel. Terry Ilous (XYZ) replaced Jack Russell at the Coach House during the summer of 2010, and Paul Shortino (Rough Cutt, Quiet Riot, King Kobra) filled in for Russell when Great White performed at Stockholm Rock Out Festival in September.


title: Great White

text: By 2011, Great White was touring regularly with Ilous fronting the band, as they continued waiting for Russell to fully recover and return as lead singer. The band appeared to be on good terms with Russell even as late as August 2011, when Kendall stated in an interview that the group were still actively awaiting his return to the stage, further indicating that Russell was not only supportive of the current situation, but even checking in with Ilous on occasion to give the latter encouragement and thank him for doing such a great job singing Great White's songs. However, Kendall did also state during this interview that while he and his bandmates were eager for Russell to rejoin, they did want to make sure the time was right and that "when he's back[,] he's back all the way." A later interview with Kendall provided additional detail, indicating that the band had initially hoped Russell would rejoin by the early summer of 2011, but that he was not in any condition to return at that time. Kendall also mentioned that the band had several stipulations that Russell would need to meet to return to the lineup, and that Russell himself had set a new target return date of February 2012, meaning he would not be performing with Great White for the remainder of 2011.


title: Great White

text: Before the year's end, however, Russell had apparently become impatient or disenchanted with this arrangement. In December 2011, just days after informing the band that (on advice from his doctor) he would not be able to rejoin by the February target date, he obtained a licensing agreement from Great White, and formed a new incarnation of Great White with a brand-new lineup under the name of Jack Russell's Great White. The other band members immediately voiced their surprise and strong objection to this move and said that "Jack Russell does not have the right to start his own Great White or use the name without our names in the lineup. We will litigate any promoter that books 'Jack Russell's Great White' or uses any logo featuring the name Great White." In September 2013, the parties finally reached an agreement in Federal Court that legally Jack Russell will turn all his rights to the "Great White" name over to Kendall, Lardie, and Desbrow. They in turn leased a way for Russell to make a living using the name Jack Russell's Great White with his own band, while the other original members would continue to tour with Terry Ilous, using the official name Great White.


title: Great White

text: On March 18, 2012, Great White announced their first new album with Ilous, "Elation", to be released in May that year, along with a live album ("Great White: 30 years – Live On the Sunset Strip") and a concert DVD of the band's 30th-anniversary show at the Key Club in Hollywood on March 22.


title: Great White

text: Meanwhile, Russell continued to front his own version of the group as Jack Russell's Great White. In July 2013, this lineup's long-time bassist Dario Seixas left the group and was replaced by Great White's former bassist Tony Montana, who returned to a Great White–associated lineup after an absence of more than 20 years.


title: Great White

text: Lorne Black, Great White's original bassist, who performed and recorded with the group up through the "Once Bitten" album, died on September 27, 2013. He was 50 years old.


title: Great White

text: In a November 2015 interview with "Dayton Daily News", Michael Lardie stated that Great White was "hoping to get into the studio in February or March to at least flesh out some ideas" for their next album. In October 2016, it was reported that Great White would enter WireWorld Studio in Mount Juliet, Tennessee on January 2, 2017, to begin recording their new album with producer Michael Wagener, whose collaboration with the band dates back to their 1983 EP "Out of the Night" and 1984 self-titled debut album. On June 2, 2017, Great White released their most recent studio effort, "Full Circle", on Bluez Tone Records, with Wagener as the producer. The song "Big Time" was released as the first single and video. This was the last studio effort featuring Terry Ilous on lead vocals before his replacement in 2018 by Mitch Malloy. The album has been met with mixed reviews, with review site Glitter2Gutter stating, "Disappointing as a Great White record, but at least it's better than "Elation". Rock this at a 5.5."


title: Great White

text: On July 19, 2016, the group signed with Frontiers Music. The first single with Frontiers, "Blame It On The Night", was released November 30, 2016. The second single "She Moves Me" was released on December 14, 2016. On January 5, 2017, they premiered their third single "Love Don't Live Here". Jack Russell's Great White released the music video for the song "Sign of the Times" on January 18, 2017. The debut album "He Saw It Comin"' released on January 27, 2017. Reviews have been largely positive for the new record, with Glitter2Gutter stating, "Crank this eclectic collection to an excellent 8.5, but give it time to grow on you organically. Don't try to force the record into being "Psycho City II" or "Shot In the Dark II", because you will be being unfair to yourself and to the record."


title: Great White

text: In February 2017, it was announced that Great White would appear at Rockingham Festival 2017, to be held at Nottingham Trent University, UK, between October 20 and 22, 2017, the band scheduled to appear on Sunday 22nd. In late June, it was announced that Jack Russell's Great White would celebrate the 30th anniversary of 1987's "Once Bitten" by announcing a tour and a new acoustic album titled "Once Acoustically Bitten", which was released on July 14. They performed material from both albums with the former being performed in its entirety on some shows. Prior to the tour, the band previewed material from the acoustic album on June 29 at the Guitar Center in Los Angeles.


title: Great White

text: On July 9, 2018, Great White announced that they had parted ways with Terry Illous as their singer, a situation that he was not aware of until he found out "through an e-mail and the Internet", and he was replaced by Mitch Malloy. Guitarist Mark Kendall later claimed that one of the reasons the band had parted ways with Illous was because the chemistry "wasn't working", and added that they "were kind of growing apart from Terry a little bit — not really for any reason. Nothing like big fights or anything."


title: Great White

text: On July 9, 2020, amidst growing COVID-19 numbers, Great White played an outdoor show in Malloy's birthplace, Dickinson, North Dakota as part of "First on First Dickinson Summer Nights". While numerous events have been imposing restrictions, such as wearing masks and social distancing, "First on First" has no such rules in place. The concert did draw attention for the lack of safety measures during the pandemic, after which the band released a public apology statement.


title: Great White

text: On May 31, 2022, Great White announced they had parted ways with Mitch Malloy and replaced him with vocalist Andrew Freeman of Last in Line, and shortly thereafter, the band embarked on its first major tour with Freeman. The new lineup also intends to work on new music in the future. On October 19, it was announced that Brett Carlisle (who filled in for Freeman a month prior on several dates) was the new vocalist of the band, due to Freeman's commitment with Last in Line.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: South Slavic languages historically formed a continuum. The turbulent history of the area, particularly due to expansion of the Ottoman Empire, resulted in a patchwork of dialectal and religious differences. Due to population migrations, Shtokavian became the most widespread dialect in the western Balkans, intruding westwards into the area previously occupied by Chakavian and Kajkavian (which further blend into Slovenian in the northwest). Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs differ in religion and were historically often part of different cultural circles, although a large part of the nations have lived side by side under foreign overlords. During that period, the language was referred to under a variety of names, such as "Slavic" in general or "Serbian", "Croatian" or "Bosnian" in particular. In a classicizing manner, it was also referred to as "Illyrian".


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The process of linguistic standardization of Serbo-Croatian was originally initiated in the mid-19th-century Vienna Literary Agreement by Croatian and Serbian writers and philologists, decades before a Yugoslav state was established. From the very beginning, there were slightly different literary Serbian and Croatian standards, although both were based on the same dialect of Shtokavian, Eastern Herzegovinian. In the 20th century, Serbo-Croatian served as the official language of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (when it was called "Serbo-Croato-Slovenian"), and later as one of the official languages of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The breakup of Yugoslavia affected language attitudes, so that social conceptions of the language separated along ethnic and political lines. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnian has likewise been established as an official standard in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and there is an ongoing movement to codify a separate Montenegrin standard.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Like other South Slavic languages, Serbo-Croatian has a simple phonology, with the common five-vowel system and twenty-five consonants. Its grammar evolved from Common Slavic, with complex inflection, preserving seven grammatical cases in nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. Verbs exhibit imperfective or perfective aspect, with a moderately complex tense system. Serbo-Croatian is a pro-drop language with flexible word order, subject–verb–object being the default. It can be written in either localized variants of Latin (Gaj's Latin alphabet, Montenegrin Latin) or Cyrillic (Serbian Cyrillic, Montenegrin Cyrillic) whose thirty letters mutually map one-to-one, and the orthography is highly phonemic in all standards.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Serbo-Croatian generally goes by the individual names Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and sometimes Montenegrin and Bunjevac.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In the language itself, it is typically known as / "Serbo-Croatian", / "Croato-Serbian", or informally / "ours".


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Throughout the history of the South Slavs, the vernacular, literary, and written languages (e.g. Chakavian, Kajkavian, Shtokavian) of the various regions and ethnicities developed and diverged independently. Prior to the 19th century, they were collectively called "Illyric", "Slavic", "Slavonian", "Bosnian", "Dalmatian", "Serbian" or "Croatian". Since the nineteenth century the term "Illyrian" or "Illyric" was used quite often (thus creating confusion with the Illyrian language). Although the word "Illyrian" was used on a few occasions before, its widespread usage began after Ljudevit Gaj and several other prominent linguists met at Ljudevit Vukotinović's house to discuss the issue in 1832. The term "Serbo-Croatian" was first used by Jacob Grimm in 1824, popularized by the Viennese philologist Jernej Kopitar in the following decades, and accepted by Croatian Zagreb grammarians in 1854 and 1859. At that time, Serb and Croat lands were still part of the Ottoman and Austrian Empires. Officially, the language was called variously "Serbo-Croat, Croato-Serbian, Serbian and Croatian, Croatian and Serbian, Serbian or Croatian, Croatian or Serbian." Unofficially, Serbs and Croats typically called the language "Serbian" or "Croatian", respectively, without implying a distinction between the two, and again in independent Bosnia and Herzegovina, "Bosnian", "Croatian", and "Serbian" were considered to be three names of a single official language. Croatian linguist Dalibor Brozović advocated the term "Serbo-Croatian" as late as 1988, claiming that in an analogy with Indo-European, Serbo-Croatian does not only name the two components of the same language, but simply charts the limits of the region in which it is spoken and includes everything between the limits ('Bosnian' and 'Montenegrin'). Today, use of the term "Serbo-Croatian" is controversial due to the prejudice that nation and language must match. It is still used for lack of a succinct alternative, though alternative names have emerged, such as "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian" (BCS), which is often seen in political contexts such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In the 9th century, Old Church Slavonic was adopted as the language of the liturgy in churches serving various Slavic nations. This language was gradually adapted to non-liturgical purposes and became known as the Croatian version of Old Slavonic. The two variants of the language, liturgical and non-liturgical, continued to be a part of the Glagolitic service as late as the middle of the 19th century. The earliest known Croatian Church Slavonic Glagolitic manuscripts are the "Glagolita Clozianus" and the "Vienna Folia" from the 11th century.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The beginning of written Serbo-Croatian can be traced from the tenth century and on when Serbo-Croatian medieval texts were written in five scripts: Latin, Glagolitic, Early Cyrillic, Bosnian Cyrillic ("bosančica/bosanica"), and Arebica, the last principally by Bosniak nobility. Serbo-Croatian competed with the more established literary languages of Latin and Old Slavonic in the west and Persian and Arabic in the east.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Old Slavonic developed into the Serbo-Croatian variant of Church Slavonic between the 12th and 16th centuries.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Among the earliest attestations of Serbo-Croatian are: the Humac tablet, dating from the 10th or 11th century, written in Bosnian Cyrillic and Glagolitic; the Plomin tablet, dating from the same era, written in Glagolitic; the Valun tablet, dated to the 11th century, written in Glagolitic and Latin; and the Inscription of Župa Dubrovačka, a Glagolitic tablet dated to the 11th century.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The Baška tablet from the late 11th century was written in Glagolitic. It is a large stone tablet found in the small Church of St. Lucy, Jurandvor on the Croatian island of Krk that contains text written mostly in Chakavian in the Croatian script. It is also important in the history of the nation as it mentions Zvonimir, the king of Croatia at the time.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The Charter of Ban Kulin of 1189, written by Ban Kulin of Bosnia, was an early Shtokavian text, written in Bosnian Cyrillic.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The luxurious and ornate representative texts of Serbo-Croatian Church Slavonic belong to the later era, when they coexisted with the Serbo-Croatian vernacular literature. The most notable are the "Missal of Duke Novak" from the Lika region in northwestern Croatia (1368), "Evangel from Reims" (1395, named after the town of its final destination), Hrvoje's Missal from Bosnia and Split in Dalmatia (1404), and the first printed book in Serbo-Croatian, the Glagolitic Missale Romanum Glagolitice (1483).


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: During the 13th century Serbo-Croatian vernacular texts began to appear, the most important among them being the "Istrian land survey" of 1275 and the "Vinodol Codex" of 1288, both written in the Chakavian dialect.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The Shtokavian dialect literature, based almost exclusively on Chakavian original texts of religious provenance (missals, breviaries, prayer books) appeared almost a century later. The most important purely Shtokavian vernacular text is the Vatican Croatian Prayer Book (c. 1400).


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Both the language used in legal texts and that used in Glagolitic literature gradually came under the influence of the vernacular, which considerably affected its phonological, morphological, and lexical systems. From the 14th and the 15th centuries, both secular and religious songs at church festivals were composed in the vernacular.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Writers of early Serbo-Croatian religious poetry ("začinjavci") gradually introduced the vernacular into their works. These "začinjavci" were the forerunners of the rich literary production of the 16th-century literature, which, depending on the area, was Chakavian-, Kajkavian-, or Shtokavian-based. The language of religious poems, translations, miracle and morality plays contributed to the popular character of medieval Serbo-Croatian literature.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: One of the earliest dictionaries, also in the Slavic languages as a whole, was the "Bosnian–Turkish Dictionary" of 1631 authored by Muhamed Hevaji Uskufi and was written in the Arebica script.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In the mid-19th century, Serbian (led by self-taught writer and folklorist Vuk Stefanović Karadžić) and most Croatian writers and linguists (represented by the Illyrian movement and led by Ljudevit Gaj and Đuro Daničić), proposed the use of the most widespread dialect, Shtokavian, as the base for their common standard language. Karadžić standardised the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, and Gaj and Daničić standardized the Croatian Latin alphabet, on the basis of vernacular speech phonemes and the principle of phonological spelling. In 1850 Serbian and Croatian writers and linguists signed the Vienna Literary Agreement, declaring their intention to create a unified standard. Thus a complex bi-variant language appeared, which the Serbs officially called "Serbo-Croatian" or "Serbian or Croatian" and the Croats "Croato-Serbian", or "Croatian or Serbian". Yet, in practice, the variants of the conceived common literary language served as different literary variants, chiefly differing in lexical inventory and stylistic devices. The common phrase describing this situation was that Serbo-Croatian or "Croatian or Serbian" was a single language. In 1861, after a long debate, the Croatian Sabor put up several proposed names to a vote of the members of the parliament; "Yugoslavian" was opted for by the majority and legislated as the official language of the Triune Kingdom. The Austrian Empire, suppressing Pan-Slavism at the time, did not confirm this decision and legally rejected the legislation, but in 1867 finally settled on "Croatian or Serbian" instead. During the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the language of all three nations in this territory was declared "Bosnian" until the death of administrator von Kállay in 1907, at which point the name was changed to "Serbo-Croatian".


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: With unification of the first the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes – the approach of Karadžić and the Illyrians became dominant. The official language was called "Serbo-Croato-Slovenian" ("srpsko-hrvatsko-slovenački") in the 1921 constitution. In 1929, the constitution was suspended, and the country was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, while the official language of Serbo-Croato-Slovene was reinstated in the 1931 constitution.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In June 1941, the Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia began to rid the language of "Eastern" (Serbian) words, and shut down Serbian schools. The totalitarian dictatorship introduced a language law that promulgated Croatian linguistic purism as a policy that tried to implement a complete elimination of Serbisms and internationalisms.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: On January 15, 1944, the Anti-Fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) declared Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, and Macedonian to be equal in the entire territory of Yugoslavia. In 1945 the decision to recognize Croatian and Serbian as separate languages was reversed in favor of a single Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian language. In the Communist-dominated second Yugoslavia, ethnic issues eased to an extent, but the matter of language remained blurred and unresolved.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In 1954, major Serbian and Croatian writers, linguists and literary critics, backed by Matica srpska and Matica hrvatska signed the Novi Sad Agreement, which in its first conclusion stated: "Serbs, Croats and Montenegrins share a single language with two equal variants that have developed around Zagreb (western) and Belgrade (eastern)". The agreement insisted on the equal status of Cyrillic and Latin scripts, and of Ekavian and Ijekavian pronunciations. It also specified that "Serbo-Croatian" should be the name of the language in official contexts, while in unofficial use the traditional "Serbian" and "Croatian" were to be retained. Matica hrvatska and Matica srpska were to work together on a dictionary, and a committee of Serbian and Croatian linguists was asked to prepare a "pravopis". During the sixties both books were published simultaneously in Ijekavian Latin in Zagreb and Ekavian Cyrillic in Novi Sad. Yet Croatian linguists claim that it was an act of unitarianism. The evidence supporting this claim is patchy: Croatian linguist Stjepan Babić complained that the television transmission from Belgrade always used the Latin alphabet— which was true, but was not proof of unequal rights, but of frequency of use and prestige. Babić further complained that the Novi Sad Dictionary (1967) listed side by side words from both the Croatian and Serbian variants wherever they differed, which one can view as proof of careful respect for both variants, and not of unitarism. Moreover, Croatian linguists criticized those parts of the Dictionary for being unitaristic that were written by Croatian linguists. And finally, Croatian linguists ignored the fact that the material for the "Pravopisni rječnik" came from the Croatian Philological Society. Regardless of these facts, Croatian intellectuals brought the Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language in 1967. On occasion of the publication's 45th anniversary, the Croatian weekly journal "Forum" published the Declaration again in 2012, accompanied by a critical analysis.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: West European scientists judge the Yugoslav language policy as an exemplary one: although three-quarters of the population spoke one language, no single language was official on a federal level. Official languages were declared only at the level of constituent republics and provinces, and very generously: Vojvodina had five (among them Slovak and Romanian, spoken by 0.5 per cent of the population), and Kosovo four (Albanian, Turkish, Romany and Serbo-Croatian). Newspapers, radio and television studios used sixteen languages, fourteen were used as languages of tuition in schools, and nine at universities. Only the Yugoslav Army used Serbo-Croatian as the sole language of command, with all other languages represented in the army's other activities—however, this is not different from other armies of multilingual states, or in other specific institutions, such as international air traffic control where English is used worldwide. All variants of Serbo-Croatian were used in state administration and republican and federal institutions. Both Serbian and Croatian variants were represented in respectively different grammar books, dictionaries, school textbooks and in books known as pravopis (which detail spelling rules). Serbo-Croatian was a kind of soft standardisation. However, legal equality could not dampen the prestige Serbo-Croatian had: since it was the language of three quarters of the population, it functioned as an unofficial lingua franca. And within Serbo-Croatian, the Serbian variant, with twice as many speakers as the Croatian, enjoyed greater prestige, reinforced by the fact that Slovene and Macedonian speakers preferred it to the Croatian variant because their languages are also Ekavian. This is a common situation in other pluricentric languages, e.g. the variants of German differ according to their prestige, the variants of Portuguese too. Moreover, all languages differ in terms of prestige: "the fact is that languages (in terms of prestige, learnability etc.) are not equal, and the law cannot make them equal".


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In 2017, the "Declaration on the Common Language" ("Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku") was signed by a group of NGOs and linguists from former Yugoslavia. It states that all variants belong to a common polycentric language.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The total number of persons who declared their native language as either 'Bosnian', 'Croatian', 'Serbian', 'Montenegrin', or 'Serbo-Croatian' in countries of the region is about 16 million.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Serbian is spoken by about 9.5 million, mostly in Serbia (6.7m), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1.4m), and Montenegro (0.4m). Serbian minorities are found in Kosovo, North Macedonia and in Romania. In Serbia, there are about 760,000 second-language speakers of Serbian, including Hungarians in Vojvodina and the 400,000 estimated Roma.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In Kosovo, Serbian is spoken by the members of the Serbian minority which approximates between 70,000 and 100,000. Familiarity of Kosovo Albanians with Serbian varies depending on age and education, and exact numbers are not available.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Croatian is spoken by roughly 4.8 million, including some 575,000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A small Croatian minority that lives in Italy, known as Molise Croats, have somewhat preserved traces of Croatian. In Croatia, 170,000, mostly Italians and Hungarians, use it as a second language.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Bosnian is spoken by 2.2 million people, chiefly Bosniaks, including about 220,000 in Serbia and Montenegro.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The notion of Montenegrin as a separate standard from Serbian is relatively recent. In the 2011 census, around 229,251 Montenegrins, of the country's 620,000, declared Montenegrin as their native language. That figure is likely to increase, due to the country's independence and strong institutional backing of the Montenegrin language.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Serbo-Croatian is also a second language of many Slovenians and Macedonians, especially those born during the time of Yugoslavia. According to the 2002 Census, Serbo-Croatian and its variants have the largest number of speakers of the minority languages in Slovenia.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Outside the Balkans, there are over two million native speakers of the language(s), especially in countries which are frequent targets of immigration, such as Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, and the United States.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Serbo-Croatian is a highly inflected language. Traditional grammars list seven cases for nouns and adjectives: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental, reflecting the original seven cases of Proto-Slavic, and indeed older forms of Serbo-Croatian itself. However, in modern Shtokavian the locative has almost merged into dative (the only difference is based on accent in some cases), and the other cases can be shown declining; namely:


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Like most Slavic languages, there are mostly three genders for nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter, a distinction which is still present even in the plural (unlike Russian and, in part, the Čakavian dialect). They also have two numbers: singular and plural. However, some consider there to be three numbers (paucal or "dual," too), since (still preserved in closely related Slovene) after two ("dva", "dvije"/"dve"), three ("tri") and four ("četiri"), and all numbers ending in them (e.g. twenty-two, ninety-three, one hundred four) the genitive singular is used, and after all other numbers five ("pet") and up, the genitive plural is used. (The number one ["jedan"] is treated as an adjective.) Adjectives are placed in front of the noun they modify and must agree in both case and number with it.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: There are seven tenses for verbs: past, present, future, exact future, aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect; and three moods: indicative, imperative, and conditional. However, the latter three tenses are typically used only in Shtokavian writing, and the time sequence of the exact future is more commonly formed through an alternative construction.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In addition, like most Slavic languages, the Shtokavian verb also has one of two aspects: perfective or imperfective. Most verbs come in pairs, with the perfective verb being created out of the imperfective by adding a prefix or making a stem change. The imperfective aspect typically indicates that the action is unfinished, in progress, or repetitive; while the perfective aspect typically denotes that the action was completed, instantaneous, or of limited duration. Some Štokavian tenses (namely, aorist and imperfect) favor a particular aspect (but they are rarer or absent in Čakavian and Kajkavian). Actually, aspects "compensate" for the relative lack of tenses, because aspect of the verb determines whether the act is completed or in progress in the referred time.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The Serbo-Croatian vowel system is simple, with only five vowels in Shtokavian. All vowels are monophthongs. The oral vowels are as follows:


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The vowels can be short or long, but the phonetic quality does not change depending on the length. In a word, vowels can be long in the stressed syllable and the syllables following it, never in the ones preceding it.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants. As in English, voice is phonemic, but aspiration is not.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In consonant clusters all consonants are either voiced or voiceless. All the consonants are voiced if the last consonant is normally voiced or voiceless if the last consonant is normally voiceless. This rule does not apply to approximantsa consonant cluster may contain voiced approximants and voiceless consonants; as well as to foreign words ("Washington" would be transcribed as "VašinGton"), personal names and when consonants are not inside of one syllable.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Apart from Slovene, Serbo-Croatian is the only Slavic language with a pitch accent (simple tone) system. This feature is present in some other Indo-European languages, such as Norwegian, Ancient Greek, and Punjabi. Neo-Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian, which is used as the basis for standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian, has four "accents", which involve either a rising or falling tone on either long or short vowels, with optional post-tonic lengths:


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The tone stressed vowels can be approximated in English with "set" vs. "setting?" said in isolation for a short tonic "e," or "leave" vs. "leaving?" for a long tonic "i," due to the prosody of final stressed syllables in English.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: There are no other rules for accent placement, thus the accent of every word must be learned individually; furthermore, in inflection, accent shifts are common, both in type and position (the so-called "mobile paradigms"). The second rule is not strictly obeyed, especially in borrowed words.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Comparative and historical linguistics offers some clues for memorising the accent position: If one compares many standard Serbo-Croatian words to e.g. cognate Russian words, the accent in the Serbo-Croatian word will be one syllable before the one in the Russian word, with the rising tone. Historically, the rising tone appeared when the place of the accent shifted to the preceding syllable (the so-called "Neo-Shtokavian retraction"), but the quality of this new accent was different – its melody still "gravitated" towards the original syllable. Most Shtokavian (Neo-Shtokavian) dialects underwent this shift, but Chakavian, Kajkavian and the Old-Shtokavian dialects did not.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Accent diacritics are not used in the ordinary orthography, but only in the linguistic or language-learning literature (e.g. dictionaries, orthography and grammar books). However, there are very few minimal pairs where an error in accent can lead to misunderstanding.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Serbo-Croatian orthography is almost entirely phonetic. Thus, most words should be spelled as they are pronounced. In practice, the writing system does not take into account allophones which occur as a result of interaction between words:


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Also, there are some exceptions, mostly applied to foreign words and compounds, that favor morphological/etymological over phonetic spelling:


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: One systemic exception is that the consonant clusters ds and dš are not respelled as ts and tš (although "d" tends to be unvoiced in normal speech in such clusters):


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The oldest texts since the 11th century are in Glagolitic, and the oldest preserved text written completely in the Latin alphabet is , from 1345. The Arabic alphabet had been used by Bosniaks; Greek writing is out of use there, and Arabic and Glagolitic persisted so far partly in religious liturgies.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Today, it is written in both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Serbian and Bosnian variants use both alphabets, while Croatian uses the Latin only.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Latin script has become more and more popular in Serbia, as it is easy to input on phones and computers.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The Croatian Latin alphabet () followed suit shortly afterwards, when Ljudevit Gaj defined it as standard Latin with five extra letters that had diacritics, apparently borrowing much from Czech, but also from Polish, and inventing the unique digraphs , and . These digraphs are represented as , and respectively in the , published by the former Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb. The latter digraphs, however, are unused in the literary standard of the language. All in all, this makes Serbo-Croatian the only Slavic language to officially use both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, albeit the Latin version is more commonly used.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The digraphs "Lj", "Nj" and "Dž" represent distinct phonemes and are considered to be single letters. In crosswords, they are put into a single square, and in sorting, lj follows l and nj follows n, except in a few words where the individual letters are pronounced separately. For instance, "nadživ(j)eti" "to outlive" is composed of the prefix "out, over" and the verb "to live". The Cyrillic alphabet avoids such ambiguity by providing a single letter for each phoneme: .


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: "Đ" used to be commonly written as "Dj" on typewriters, but that practice led to too many ambiguities. It is also used on car license plates. Today "Dj" is often used again in place of "Đ" on the Internet as a replacement due to the lack of installed Serbo-Croat keyboard layouts.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Montenegrin alphabet, adopted in 2009, provides replacements of and with digraphs and in both Latin and Cyrillic, but they remain largely unused, even by the Parliament of Montenegro which introduced them.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: South Slavic historically formed a dialect continuum, i.e. each dialect has some similarities with the neighboring one, and differences grow with distance. However, migrations from the 16th to 18th centuries resulting from the spread of Ottoman Empire on the Balkans have caused large-scale population displacement that broke the dialect continuum into many geographical pockets. Migrations in the 20th century, primarily caused by urbanization and wars, also contributed to the reduction of dialectal differences.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The primary dialects are named after the most common question word for "what": Shtokavian uses the pronoun "što" or "šta", Chakavian uses "ča" or "ca", Kajkavian ("kajkavski"), "kaj" or "kej". In native terminology they are referred to as "nar(j)ečje", which would be equivalent of "group of dialects", whereas their many subdialects are referred to as "dijalekti ""dialects" or "govori ""speeches".


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The pluricentric Serbo-Croatian standard language and all four contemporary standard variants are based on the Eastern Herzegovinian subdialect of Neo-Shtokavian. Other dialects are not taught in schools or used by the state media. The Torlakian dialect is often added to the list, though sources usually note that it is a transitional dialect between Shtokavian and the Bulgaro-Macedonian dialects.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The Serbo-Croatian dialects differ not only in the question word they are named after, but also heavily in phonology, accentuation and intonation, case endings and tense system (morphology) and basic vocabulary. In the past, Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects were spoken on a much larger territory, but have been replaced by Štokavian during the period of migrations caused by Ottoman Turkish conquest of the Balkans in the 15th and the 16th centuries. These migrations caused the koinéisation of the Shtokavian dialects, that used to form the West Shtokavian (more closer and transitional towards the neighbouring Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects) and East Shtokavian (transitional towards the Torlakian and the whole Bulgaro-Macedonian area) dialect bundles, and their subsequent spread at the expense of Chakavian and Kajkavian. As a result, Štokavian now covers an area larger than all the other dialects combined, and continues to make its progress in the enclaves where non-literary dialects are still being spoken.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The differences among the dialects can be illustrated on the example of Schleicher's fable. Diacritic signs are used to show the difference in accents and prosody, which are often quite significant, but which are not reflected in the usual orthography.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: A series of isoglosses crosscuts the main dialects. The modern reflexes of the long Common Slavic vowel "jat", usually transcribed *ě, vary by location as /i/, /e/, and /ije/ or /je/. Local varieties of the dialects are labeled Ikavian, Ekavian, and Ijekavian, respectively, depending on the reflex. The long and short "jat" is reflected as long or short */i/ and /e/ in Ikavian and Ekavian, but Ijekavian dialects introduce a "ije"/"je" alternation to retain a distinction.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Standard Croatian and Bosnian are based on Ijekavian, whereas Serbian uses both Ekavian and Ijekavian forms (Ijekavian for Bosnian Serbs, Ekavian for most of Serbia). Influence of standard language through state media and education has caused non-standard varieties to lose ground to the literary forms.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The jat-reflex rules are not without exception. For example, when short "jat" is preceded by "r", in most Ijekavian dialects developed into /re/ or, occasionally, /ri/. The prefix "prě-" ("trans-, over-") when long became "pre-" in eastern Ijekavian dialects but to "prije-" in western dialects; in Ikavian pronunciation, it also evolved into "pre-" or "prije-" due to potential ambiguity with "pri-" ("approach, come close to"). For verbs that had "-ěti " in their infinitive, the past participle ending "-ěl" evolved into "-io" in Ijekavian Neo-Štokavian.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The nature and classification of Serbo-Croatian has been the subject of long-standing sociolinguistic debate. The question is whether Serbo-Croatian should be called a single language or a cluster of closely related languages.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Enisa Kafadar argues that there is only one Serbo-Croatian language with several varieties. This has made it possible to include all four varieties in new grammars of the language. Daniel Bunčić concludes that it is a pluricentric language, with four standard variants spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The mutual intelligibility between their speakers "exceeds that between the standard variants of English, French, German, or Spanish". "There is no doubt of the near 100% mutual intelligibility of (standard) Croatian and (standard) Serbian, as is obvious from the ability of all groups to enjoy each others' films, TV and sports broadcasts, newspapers, rock lyrics etc." Other linguists have argued that the differences between the variants of Serbo-Croatian are less significant than those between the variants of English, German, Dutch, and Hindustani.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Among pluricentric languages, Serbo-Croatian was the only one with a pluricentric standardisation within one state. The dissolution of Yugoslavia has made Serbo-Croatian even more of a typical pluricentric language, since the variants of other pluricentric languages are also spoken in different states.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: As in other pluricentric languages, all Serbo-Croatian standard varieties are based on the same dialect (the Eastern Herzegovinian subdialect of the Shtokavian dialect) and consequently, according to the sociolinguistic definitions, constitute a single pluricentric language (and not, for example, several Ausbau languages). According to linguist John Bailyn, "An examination of all the major 'levels' of language shows that BCS is clearly a single language with a single grammatical system."


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In 2017, numerous prominent writers, scientists, journalists, activists and other public figures from Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia signed the Declaration on the Common Language, which states that in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro a common polycentric standard language is used, consisting of several standard varieties, such as German, English or Spanish.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The use of "Serbo-Croatian" as a linguistic label has been the subject of long-standing controversy. Wayles Browne calls it a "term of convenience" and notes the difference of opinion as to whether it comprises a single language or a cluster of languages. Ronelle Alexander refers to the national standards as three separate languages, but also notes that the reasons for this are complex and generally non-linguistic. She calls BCS (her term for Serbo-Croatian) a single language for communicative linguistic purposes, but three separate languages for symbolic non-linguistic purposes.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The current Serbian constitution of 2006 refers to the official language as "Serbian", while the Montenegrin constitution of 2007 proclaimed "Montenegrin" as the primary official language, but also grants other languages the right of official use.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has specified different Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) numbers for Croatian "(UDC 862," abbreviation hr) and Serbian "(UDC 861", abbreviation sr), while the cover term "Serbo-Croatian" is used to refer to the combination of original signs ("UDC 861/862," abbreviation sh). Furthermore, the "ISO 639" standard designates the Bosnian language with the abbreviations bos and bs.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: While it operated, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which had English and French as official languages, translated court proceedings and documents into what it referred to as "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian", usually abbreviated as BCS. Translators were employed from all regions of the former Yugoslavia and all national and regional variations were accepted, regardless of the nationality of the person on trial (sometimes against a defendant's objections), on the grounds of mutual intelligibility.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: For utilitarian purposes, Serbo-Croatian is often called ""naš jezik" ("our language") or ""naški" (sic. "ourish" or "ourian") by native speakers. This term is frequently used to describe Serbo-Croatian by those who wish to avoid nationalistic and linguistic discussions. Native speakers traditionally describe their language as ""jedan ali ne jedinstven"—"one but not uniform".


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In 2021, the Board for Standardization of the Serbian Language issued an opinion that Serbo-Croatian is one language, and that it should be referred to as "Serbian language", while "Croatian", "Bosnian" and "Montenegrin" are to be considered merely local names for Serbian language. This opinion was widely criticized by Croatian government and representatives of the Croatian minority in Serbia. Serbian linguist Ranko Bugarski called this opinion "absurd" and "legacy of the 19th century linguistics". He said that Serbo-Croatian should be considered one language in a scientific sense under the "Serbo-Croatian" label, but four different languages in an administrative sense. Legally, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are all officially recognized minority languages in Serbia. the Serbian Government also officially recognized Bunjevac language as a standard minority language in 2018 and was approved by the Serbian Ministry of Education for learning in schools.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The opinion of the majority of Croatian linguists is that there has never been a Serbo-Croatian language, but two different standard languages that overlapped sometime in the course of history. However, Croatian linguist Snježana Kordić has been leading an academic discussion on this issue in the Croatian journal "Književna republika" from 2001 to 2010. In the discussion, she shows that linguistic criteria such as mutual intelligibility, the huge overlap in the linguistic system, and the same dialect basis of the standard language are evidence that Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are four national variants of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language. Igor Mandić states: "During the last ten years, it has been the longest, the most serious and most acrid discussion (…) in 21st-century Croatian culture". Inspired by that discussion, a monograph on language and nationalism has been published.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The view of the majority of Croatian linguists that there is no single Serbo-Croatian language but several different standard languages has been sharply criticized by German linguist Bernhard Gröschel in his monograph "Serbo-Croatian Between Linguistics and Politics".


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: A more detailed overview, incorporating arguments from Croatian philology and contemporary linguistics, would be as follows:


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The topic of language for writers from Dalmatia and Dubrovnik prior to the 19th century made a distinction only between speakers of Italian or Slavic, since those were the two main groups that inhabited Dalmatian city-states at that time. Whether someone spoke Croatian or Serbian was not an important distinction then, as the two languages were not distinguished by most speakers.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: However, most intellectuals and writers from Dalmatia who used the Štokavian dialect and practiced the Catholic faith saw themselves as part of a Croatian nation as far back as the mid-16th to 17th centuries, some 300 years before Serbo-Croatian ideology appeared. Their loyalty was first and foremost to Catholic Christendom, but when they professed an ethnic identity, they referred to themselves as "Slovin" and "Illyrian" (a sort of forerunner of Catholic baroque pan-Slavism) and Croatthese 30-odd writers over the span of c. 350 years always saw themselves as Croats first and never as part of a Serbian nation. It should also be noted that, in the pre-national era, Catholic religious orientation did not necessarily equate with Croat ethnic identity in Dalmatia. A Croatian follower of Vuk Karadžić, Ivan Broz, noted that for a Dalmatian to identify oneself as a Serb was seen as foreign as identifying oneself as Macedonian or Greek. Vatroslav Jagić pointed out in 1864:


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: On the other hand, the opinion of Jagić from 1864 is argued not to have firm grounds. When Jagić says "Croatian", he refers to a few cases referring to the Dubrovnik vernacular as "ilirski" (Illyrian). This was a common name for all Slavic vernaculars in Dalmatian cities among the Roman inhabitants. In the meantime, other written monuments are found that mention "srpski", "lingua serviana" (= Serbian), and some that mention Croatian. By far the most competent Serbian scientist on the Dubrovnik language issue, Milan Rešetar, who was born in Dubrovnik himself, wrote behalf of language characteristics: "The one who thinks that Croatian and Serbian are two separate languages must confess that Dubrovnik always (linguistically) used to be Serbian."


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Finally, the former "medieval" texts from Dubrovnik and Montenegro dating before the 16th century were neither true Štokavian nor Serbian, but mostly specific a Jekavian-Čakavian that was nearer to actual Adriatic islanders in Croatia.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Nationalists have conflicting views about the language(s). The nationalists among the Croats conflictingly claim either that they speak an entirely separate language from Serbs and Bosniaks or that these two peoples have, due to the longer lexicographic tradition among Croats, somehow "borrowed" their standard languages from them. Bosniak nationalists claim that both Croats and Serbs have "appropriated" the Bosnian language, since Ljudevit Gaj and Vuk Karadžić preferred the Neo-Štokavian Ijekavian dialect, widely spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as the basis for language standardization, whereas the nationalists among the Serbs claim either that any divergence in the language is artificial, or claim that the Štokavian dialect is theirs and the Čakavian Croats'— in more extreme formulations Croats have "taken" or "stolen" their language from the Serbs.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Proponents of unity among Southern Slavs claim that there is a single language with normal dialectal variations. The term "Serbo-Croatian" (or synonyms) is not officially used in any of the successor countries of former Yugoslavia.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In Serbia, the Serbian standard has an official status countrywide, while both Serbian and Croatian are official in the province of Vojvodina. A large Bosniak minority is present in the southwest region of Sandžak, but the "official recognition" of Bosnian is moot. Bosnian is an optional course in first and second grade of the elementary school, while it is also in official use in the municipality of Novi Pazar. However, its nomenclature is controversial, as there is incentive that it is referred to as "Bosniak" ("bošnjački") rather than "Bosnian" ("bosanski") (see Bosnian language#Controversy and recognition for details).


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Croatian is the official language of Croatia, while Serbian is also official in municipalities with significant Serb population.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: In Bosnia and Herzegovina, all three standard languages are recorded as official. Confrontations have on occasion been absurd. The academic Muhamed Filipović, in an interview to Slovenian television, told of a local court in a Croatian district requesting a paid translator to translate from Bosnian to Croatian before the trial could proceed.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia referred to the language as "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian", usually abbreviated as BCS. Translators were employed from all regions of the former Yugoslavia and all national and regional variations were accepted, regardless of the nationality of the person on trial (sometimes against a defendant's objections), on the grounds of mutual intelligibility.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Since the year 2000, the ISO classification only recognizes "Serbo-Croatian" as a 'macrolanguage', since the original codes were removed from the ISO 639-1 and ISO 639-2 standards. That left the ISO 639-3 'macrolanguage' (a book-keeping device in the ISO 639-3 standard to keep track of which ISO 639-3 codes correspond with which ISO 639-2 codes) stranded without a corresponding ISO 639-2 code.


title: Serbo-Croatian

text: Article 1 of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" in Serbo-Croatian, written in the Latin alphabet:


title: Language isolate

text: Language isolates are languages that cannot be classified into larger language families. Korean and Basque are two of the most common examples. Other language isolates include Ainu in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, and Haida in North America. The number of language isolates is unknown.


title: Language isolate

text: A language isolate is unrelated to any other, which makes it the only language in its own language family. It is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical (or "genetic") relationships—one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language.


title: Language isolate

text: One explanation for the existence of language isolates is that they might be the last remaining branch of a larger language family. The language possibly had relatives in the past which have since disappeared without being documented. Another explanation for language isolates is that they developed in isolation from other languages. This explanation mostly applies to sign languages that have arisen independently of other spoken or signed languages.


title: Language isolate

text: Some languages once seen as isolates may be reclassified as small families if some of their dialects are judged to be sufficiently different from the standard to be seen as different languages. Examples include Japanese and Georgian: Japanese is now considered to be in the Japonic language family with the Ryukyuan languages, and Georgian is the main language in the Kartvelian language family. There is a difference between language isolates and unclassified languages, but they can be difficult to differentiate when it comes to classifying extinct languages. If such efforts eventually do prove fruitful, a language previously considered an isolate may no longer be considered one, as happened with the Yanyuwa language of northern Australia, which has been placed in the Pama–Nyungan family. Since linguists do not always agree on whether a genetic relationship has been demonstrated, it is often disputed whether a language is an isolate.


title: Language isolate

text: A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genealogical (or "genetic") relationship to any other known language. It is not the descendant of any ancestral language which has other known descendants or daughter languages.


title: Language isolate

text: The term "genetic relationship" in the sense of historical linguistics is used to group most languages spoken in the world today into a relatively small number of language families, according to proof of reconstructed descent from common ancestral languages. A "genetic relationship" is a connection between languages, like similarities in vocabulary or grammar, that can be attributed to a common ancestral language that diverged into multiple daughter languages or branches. This is what makes up a language family, which is a set of languages for which sufficient evidence exists to demonstrate that they descend from a single ancestral language and are therefore genetically related. For example, English is related to other Indo-European languages and Mandarin Chinese is related to other Sino-Tibetan languages. By this criterion, each language isolate constitutes a family of its own.


title: Language isolate

text: In some situations, a language with no ancestor can arise. This frequently happens with sign languages—most famously in the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language, where deaf children with no language were placed together and developed a new language.


title: Language isolate

text: Caution is required when speaking of extinct languages as language isolates. Despite their great age, Sumerian and Elamite can be safely classified as isolates, as the languages are well enough documented that, if modern relatives existed, they would be recognizably related. A language thought to be an isolate may turn out to be related to other languages once enough material is recovered, but this is unlikely for extinct languages whose written records have not been preserved.


title: Language isolate

text: Many extinct languages are very poorly attested which may lead to them being considered unclassified languages instead of language isolates. This occurs when linguists do not have enough information on a language to classify it as either a language isolate or as a part of another language family.


title: Language isolate

text: Unclassified languages are different from language isolates in that they have no demonstrable genetic relationships to other languages due to a lack of sufficient data. In order to be considered a language isolate, a language needs to have sufficient data for comparisons with other languages through methods of historical-comparative linguistics to show that it does not have any genetic relationships.


title: Language isolate

text: Many extinct languages and living languages today are very poorly attested, and the fact that they cannot be linked to other languages may be a reflection of our poor knowledge of them. Hattic, Gutian, and Kassite are all considered unclassified languages, but their status is disputed by a minority of linguists. Many extinct languages of the Americas such as Cayuse and Majena may likewise have been isolates. Several unclassified languages could also be language isolates, but linguists cannot be sure of this without sufficient evidence.


title: Language isolate

text: A number of sign languages have arisen independently, without any ancestral language, and thus are language isolates. The most famous of these is the Nicaraguan Sign Language, a well documented case of what has happened in schools for the deaf in many countries. In Tanzania, for example, there are seven schools for the deaf, each with its own sign language with no known connection to any other language. Sign languages have also developed outside schools, in communities with high incidences of deafness, such as Kata Kolok in Bali, and half a dozen sign languages of the hill tribes in Thailand including the Ban Khor Sign Language.


title: Language isolate

text: These and more are all presumed isolates or small local families, because many deaf communities are made up of people whose hearing parents do not use sign language, and have manifestly, as shown by the language itself, not borrowed their sign language from other deaf communities during the recorded history of these languages.


title: Language isolate

text: Some languages once seen as isolates may be reclassified as small families because their genetic relationship to other languages has been established. This happened with Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, Korean and Koreanic languages, Atakapa and Akokisa languages, Tol and Jicaque of El Palmar languages, and the Xincan Guatemala language family in which linguists have grouped the Chiquimulilla, Guazacapán, Jumaytepeque, and Yupiltepeque languages.


title: Language isolate

text: Below is a list of known language isolates, arranged by continent, along with notes on possible relations to other languages or language families.


title: Language isolate

text: The status column indicates the degree of endangerment of the language, according to the definitions of the UNESCO "Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger". "Vibrant" languages are those in full use by speakers of every generation, with consistent native acquisition by children. "Vulnerable" languages have a similarly wide base of native speakers, but a restricted use and the long-term risk of language shift. "Endangered" languages are either acquired irregularly or spoken only by older generations. "Moribund" languages have only a few remaining native speakers, with no new acquisition, highly restricted use, and near-universal multilingualism. "Extinct" languages have no native speakers, but are sufficiently documented to be classified as isolates.


title: Language isolate

text: With few exceptions, all of Africa's languages have been gathered into four major phyla: Afroasiatic, Niger–Congo, Nilo-Saharan and Khoisan. However, the genetic unity of some language families, like Nilo-Saharan, is questionable, and so there may be many more language families and isolates than currently accepted. Data for several African languages, like Kwisi, are not sufficient for classification. In addition, Jalaa, Shabo, Laal, Kujargé, and a few other languages within Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic-speaking areas may turn out to be isolates upon further investigation. Defaka and Ega are highly divergent languages located within Niger–Congo-speaking areas, and may also possibly be language isolates.


title: Language isolate

text: Current research considers that the “Papuasphere” centered in New Guinea includes as many as 37 isolates. (The more is known about these languages in the future, the more likely it is for these languages to be later assigned to a known language family.) To these, one must add several isolates found among non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Australia:


title: National League South

text: The National League South, formerly Conference South, is one of the second divisions of the National League in England, immediately below the top division National League. Along with National League North, it is in the second level of the National League System, and is the sixth tier overall of the English football league system.


title: National League South

text: The National League South was introduced in 2004 as part of a major restructuring of the National League System. Each year the champion of the league is automatically promoted to the National League. A second promotion place goes to the winner of a play-off involving the teams finishing in second to seventh place (expanded from four to six teams in the 2017–18 season). The three bottom clubs were relegated to Step 3 leagues.


title: National League South

text: For sponsorship reasons, it has been known as Blue Square South (2007–2010), Blue Square Bet South (2010–2013), Skrill South (2013–2014), the Vanarama Conference South (2014–2015), the Vanarama National League South (2015–2019) and the Motorama National League South following a three-year sponsorship deal announced in January 2019. Since the start of the 2015–16 season, the league is known as the National League South. The 2018–19 champions were Torquay United.


title: National League South

text: The National League South was reduced to 21 clubs for 2020–21 and was expected to expand to 24 teams in 2021–22. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic in England, the 2020–21 National League South season was curtailed and voided after written resolutions were put to a vote. No teams were relegated. Expansion would be implemented before the 2022–23 season, when the bottom club was relegated and four were promoted from Step 3. There will be four relegations from the South starting in 2023.


title: Jenny Lind

text: Johanna Maria "Jenny" Lind (6 October 18202 November 1887) was a Swedish opera singer, often called the "Swedish Nightingale". One of the most highly regarded singers of the 19th century, she performed in soprano roles in opera in Sweden and across Europe, and undertook an extraordinarily popular concert tour of the United States beginning in 1850. She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music from 1840.


title: Jenny Lind

text: Lind became famous after her performance in "Der Freischütz" in Sweden in 1838. Within a few years, she had suffered vocal damage, but the singing teacher Manuel García saved her voice. She was in great demand in opera roles throughout Sweden and northern Europe during the 1840s, and was closely associated with Felix Mendelssohn. After two acclaimed seasons in London, she announced her retirement from opera at the age of 29.