Introduction to Bosnian Language

Bosnian belongs to the South Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian, defined as the common language of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Montenegrins, officially split into three mutually intelligible languages -- Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Though the term "Serbo-Croatian" went out of use, it continues to be a focus of controversy due to its historical, cultural, and political connotations and to the lack of precision in the definition of the term "language." Suffice it to say that these languages are artifacts of political, rather than linguistic decisions.

Although Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian differ in a number of ways, these differences do not preclude mutual intelligibility and, in fact, are not as great as the differences within the languages themselves. This is not surprising since the continuous migrations of Slavic populations during the five hundred years of Turkish rule produced a crazy quilt of local dialects that cross more recently established national boundaries.

Standard Bosnian, based on the Shtokavian and Ijekavian pronunciation, is the official language, along with Serbian and Croatian, of Bosnia and Hercegovina. It is spoken by approximately 2 million people, or about 50% of its population. Bosnian is the language of the Bosniaks, or the Bosnian Muslims.

Despite their long struggle for independence, the Bosniaks showed surprisingly little interest in standardizing Bosnian in order to establish it as a separate language and to make it into a unifying national symbol. The work on standardizing Bosnian has only just begun, and there is a considerable amount of disagreement about the unique features that make it distinct from Serbian and Croatian.

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