Well, the article (excellent) does mention serbo-croat. The two languages are now growing apart, but they are certainly no more different than English and Jamaican English. So writing them in different scripts (which also reflect the different bibles) was an important setpe in separating them.

/stepe/step

What your link doesn't tell you is that "Some believe the alphabet has been used for almost 4,000 years, while others think it developed from the Bengali alphabet during the 17th century." (before being all but wiped out in 1709).(http://www.omniglot.com/writing/manipuri.htm) It would take a sensitive historian to sort that one out.

The scripting battle in India is closely related to the various decisions to use Gaelic spellings and a Gaelic version of the Roman alphabet on street signs in Ireland. I'm sure I remember something either in the Grauniad or on the Beeb recently about a move to do that even more but annoyingly can't find it.

How irritating! I know about the issue in Ireland that SRW is referring to as well, but I can't find it in the Guardian archive. AIUI certain place names in the Gaeltacht in the far southwest of Ireland are going to be offically stripped of their English translations, so that they will be known and signposted only in the native Gaelic.
Ah - here's a brief note about it:
http://u.tv/newsroom/indepth.asp?id=54477&pt=n

And qB - what a fascinating article! I've now lost a happy hour of my life reading about spelling reform in Norway and the peculiar difficulties of learning to spell in Hebrew, amongst other things.

In Ukraine, since the revolution a few months ago, the capital has been officially known as Київ which will be transliterated as Kyiv, not Kiev. Speaking Ukrainian in Ukraine is a rather politcised act since its an assertion of the country's independence from Russia.

Sorry about the length of this comment but the article really is one of the most interesting things I've come across for a long time.

...writing from Serbia... yes, we have new 'languages' springing up around these parts like mushrooms - hmm, mutating mushrooms... The fact of the matter is that what used to be known as Serbo-Croatian is now being splintered up into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, and heaven knows what other silliness they'll come up with. As the language remains, stubbornly, one and the same (I defy any of these people to have a conversation and manage to not understand exactly what their interlocutor is saying at any given time :), many curious methods are being invented to pry the dialects apart - blatant invention of new vocabulary, digging up and re-establishing ancient and long-abandoned grammar rules, intentional misunderstanding etc. etc. Serbia still uses both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabet (back when I was in elementary school - which was only a decade and a half or so ago, I hasten to add - we'd alternate between the two scripts, writing one essay assignment using Latin and the next using Cyrillic...) but much noise is being made about how we should 'protect our national alphabet' (i.e. the Cyrillic) and 'renounce the foreign influence' (i.e. the Latin, which is, incidentally, used by most of the rest of the world.....) Silliness really, all of it. I'm a Japanese major, so I'm orthographically pro-choice..... :)

Don't know if that's at all coherent, or if it adds anything to the thread....