Serbo-Croatian - Demographics

Demographics

The total number of persons who declared their native language as either 'Bosnian', 'Croatian', 'Serbian', 'Montenegrin', or 'Serbo-Croatian' in countries of the region is about 16 million.

Serbian is spoken by about 9 million mostly in Serbia (6.7m), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1.4m), and Montenegro (0.4m). Serbian minorities are found in the Republic of Macedonia and in Romania. In Serbia, there are about 760,000 second-language speakers of Serbian, including Hungarians in Vojvodina and the 400,000 estimated Roma. Familiarity of Kosovo Albanians with Serbian in Kosovo varies depending on age and education, and exact numbers are not available.

Croatian is spoken by roughly 4.7 million including some 575,000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A small Croatian minority lives in Italy known as Molise Croats have somewhat preserved traces of the Croatian language. In Croatia, 170,000 mostly Italians and Hungarians use it as a second language.

Bosnian is spoken by 2.2 million people, chiefly Bosniaks, including about 220,000 in Serbia and Montenegro.

Notion of Montenegrin as a separate standard from Serbian is relatively recent. In the 2003 census, around 150,000 Montenegrins, of the country's 620,000, declared Montenegrin as their native language. That figure is likely to increase since, due to the country's independence and strong institutional backing of Montenegrin language.

Serbo-Croatian is also a second language of many Slovenians and Macedonians, especially those born during the time of Yugoslavia. According to the 2002 Census, Serbo-Croatian and its variants have the largest number of speakers of the minority languages in Slovenia.

Outside of the Balkans, there are over 2 million native speakers of the language(s), especially in countries which are frequent targets of immigration, such as Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sweden and the United States.