Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian Language
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Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS)
This language is spoken in the following four countries in Southeastern Europe: Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia. Therefore, its common linguistic area has about 18 million native speakers. The Vienna language agreement in 1850 prescribed the Stokavian dialect from East Herzegovina as the literary standard.
There is a dispute whether this is one or more languages, which is reflected in the fact that the following names are being used for this language: Serbo-Croatian, Croatian, Bosnian (and Bosniac), Serbian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) – as the Solomonic solution invented by the US State Department Language Services.
Native speakers from any part of the common linguistic area can easily, without interpreters or translators, communicate with each other. On the basis of this communication criterion—intelligibility, we qualify it as a single language with multiple names.
The primary reason for the multitude of different names for this common language is political and not linguistic. It goes without saying that one has the right to name the language according to its own preference.
This is not to say that there are not rich dialectal differences among the language variants spoken in the four countries, and indeed, within each individual country as well (refer to the chart below). The differences are based on: 1) Development of the old Slavic vowel “Ḗ” (jat), which was transformed into three different vowels: E (Ekavian), I (Ikavian) and IJE or JE (Jekavian); 2) Which word is used for “what”—again we have three possibilities: STO/STA (Stokavian), KAJ (Kajkavian) and ČA (Cakavian); 3) The predominant script used—Latin or Cyrillic.
In all four countries, Stokavian is accepted as the standard.
COUNTRY |
WORD “WHAT” |
Old Slavic vowel “Ḗ” |
SCRIPT |
|
Stokavian Dialect |
Jekavian Dialect |
Latin and Cyrillic |
|
Stokavian Dialect is standard (Comment: Strong regional dialects in Dalmatia, and
|
Jekavian Dialect is standard, but Ekavian is used in Hrvatsko Zagorje and Ikavian in Istria and parts of
|
Latin |
|
Stokavian Dialect |
Jekavian Dialect |
Latin and Cyrillic |
|
Stokavian Dialect |
Ekavian Dialect |
Cyrillic (official) and Latin |
As you see from the chart above, when learning the BCS language, a student should specify its connection with any of the above four countries, so that the instruction can be tailored to the particular need.
The BCS language is an Indo-European language belonging to South Slavic group of Slavic languages. The closest languages are Slovenian, Macedonian and Bulgarian.
The alphabet of the BCS language is completely phonetic, that is, for each character there is one and only one corresponding sound. The alphabet consists of 30 characters, 4 more than the English one.
The grammar has a very developed morphology. Nouns, pronouns and adjectives change through seven cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative, Instrumental and Locative), three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural). Verbs have 4 past tenses, one present tense and two future tenses.