Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian

Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, closely related languages, comprising, along with Slovenian, the western group of the South Slavic languages. The languages were formerly grouped together as one language, Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. The three languages are spoken by about 21 million people in around 24 different countries. Bosnian (4 million) is spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Croatian has 4.8 million speakers in Croatia and is also spoken in Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Italy, and Slovakia. In the former Serbia and Montenegro, there were 10.2 million speakers of Serbian before the Republic of Montenegro gained independence. In Montenegro, the official language according to the 1992 constitution is Serbian, and a variety of Serbian called Montenegrin (the Ijekavian dialect) is spoken, though this is recognized by some as a language in its own right. Serbian is also spoken in Albania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Russia, and Turkey. Most Croats, along with about 500,000 Serbs, live in the Republic of Croatia. Most speakers of the languages who are Muslim live in or are refugees from the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which also has considerable numbers of Serbs and Croats.

The three varieties are politically distinct languages, though linguistically the same language, with dialectal variation and some orthographic differences. Bosnian and Croatian are written in the Latin alphabet and Serbian primarily in the Cyrillic alphabet but also using the Latin script, particularly in the FYROM. The differences between the languages are almost entirely in the vocabulary, with a few in syntax: the sound systems are essentially identical. Overall, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are at least as close as British and American English.

Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian have preserved five of the six common Slavic cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and instrumental. The locative has been merged with the dative. The vocative form remains. The verb has a present tense, two future tenses, a past (perfect), and a pluperfect. The literary language, especially in Serbian, has preserved two other past tenses: imperfect and aorist. The literary language is notable for its vowel system, where the vowels /i, e, a, o, u, r/ may be long or short and may have rising or falling intonation; thus what is written sela may have four different pronunciations and meanings, depending upon whether the first vowel is long or short and has rising or falling intonation.

The modern literary dialect (Shtokavski) used by each language was based upon Štokavian, developed during the 19th century, with the most important event being the Vienna Agreement of 1850 between Croatian and Serbian literary figures and intellectuals. Shtokavski is the official dialect in Croatia.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.