Bosnian

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.

The eastern part of Yugoslavia (i.e., Serbia, Montenegro, portions of Bosnia and Herzegovina) were religiously and culturally distinct from the western part of of the country (i.e., Croatia, and portions of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Serbia was under Ottoman rule, while Croatia was under Austro-Hungarian rule. As a result, Serbian and Croatian are based on different dialects and are written with different alphabets. Serbian and Croatian became one language in the 19th century as part of an effort to create an independent South Slavic state (yug means "south").

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 Herzegovina. 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 standardising Bosnian in order to establish it as a separate language and to make it into a unifying national symbol. The work on standardising 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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