Bosnian Language

Bosnian Language

Bosnian (bosanski / босански ) is a standardized register of the Serbo-Croatian language, a South Slavic language, spoken by Bosniaks. As a standardized form of the Shtokavian dialect, it is one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The same subdialect of Shtokavian is also the basis of standard Croatian and Serbian, as well as Montenegrin, so all are mutually intelligible. Until the dissolution of SFR Yugoslavia, they were treated as a unitary Serbo-Croatian language, and that term is still used in English to subsume the common base (vocabulary, grammar and syntax) of what are today officially four national standards, although the term is no longer used by native speakers.

The Bosnian standard uses both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Bosnian is notable amongst the varieties of Serbo-Croatian for having an eclectic assortment of Arabic, Turkish and Persian loanwords, largely due to the language's interaction with those cultures through Islamic ties. This is historically corroborated by the introduction and use of Arebica as a successor script for the Bosnian language, replacing Bosančica upon the introduction of Islam; first amongst the elite, then amongst the public. The Bosnian language also contains a number of Germanisms not often heard in the Croatian or Serbian languages that have been in use since the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The first official dictionary in the Bosnian language was printed in the early 1630s, while the first dictionary in Serbian was printed only in the mid-19th century. Written evidence and records point to the Bosnian language being the official language of the country since at least the Kingdom of Bosnia, as further corroborated by the declaration of the Charter of Ban Kulin, one of the oldest written state documents in the Balkans and one of the oldest to be written in Bosančica.