page_title: Dialects of Serbo-Croatian
section_title: Distribution and subdialects
hierarchical_section_title: Dialects of Serbo-Croatian / Main dialects / Shtokavian dialect / Distribution and subdialects
context_page_description: The dialects of Serbo-Croatian include the vernacular forms of Serbo-Croatian as a whole or as part of its standard varieties: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian. They are part of the dialect continuum of South Slavic languages that joins the Macedonian dialects to the south, Bulgarian dialects to the southeast and Slovene dialects to the northwest.
  The division of South Slavic dialects to "Slovene", "Serbo-Croatian", "Macedonian" and "Bulgarian" is mostly based on political grounds: for example all dialects within modern Slovenia are classified as "Slovene", despite some of them historically originating from other regions, while all dialects in modern Croatia are classified as "Croatian" despite not forming a coherent linguistic entity. Therefore, "Serbo-Croatian dialects" are simply South Slavic dialects in countries where a variant of Serbo-Croatian is used as the standard language.
  The primary dialects are named after the most common question word for what: Shtokavian uses the pronoun što or šta, Chakavian uses ča or ca, Kajkavian, kaj or kej.
context_section_description: Originally the dialect covered a significantly smaller area than it covers today, meaning that the Štokavian speech had spread for the last five centuries, overwhelmingly at the expense of Čakavian and Kajkavian idioms. Modern areal distribution of these three dialects as well as their internal stratification (Štokavian and Čakavian in particular) is primarily a result of the migrations resulting from the spread of Ottoman Empire on the Balkans. Migratory waves were particularly strong in the 16th–18th century, bringing about large-scale linguistic and ethnic changes on the Central South Slavic area (See: Great Serb Migrations).
  By far the most numerous, mobile and expansionist migrations were those of Ijekavian Štokavian speakers of eastern Herzegovina, who have flooded most of Western Serbia, many areas of eastern and western Bosnia, large swathes of Croatia (Banovina, Kordun, Lika, parts of Gorski kotar, continental parts of northern Dalmatia, some places north of Kupa, parts of Slavonia, southeastern Baranya etc.). This is the reason why Eastern Herzegovinian dialect is the most spoken Serbo-Croatian dialect today, and why it bears the name that is only descriptive of its area of origin. These migrations also played the pivotal role in the spread of Neo-Štokavian innovations.
  The Shtokavian dialect is divided into Old Shtokavian and Neo-Shtokavian subdialects. Subdialects grouped under Old-Shtokavian are the following:
  Slavonian dialect (also called Archaic Šćakavian).
  East Bosnian dialect (also called Jekavian-šćakavian);
  Zeta–South Raška dialect (also called Đekavian-Ijekavian);
  Kosovo–Resava dialect (also called Older Ekavian);
  Prizren-Timok dialect (also called Old-Serbian)
  Neo-Shtokavian dialects comprise the following subdialects:
  Bosnian–Dalmatian dialect (also called Western Ikavian or Younger Ikavian);
  Bunjevac dialect;
  Dubrovnik dialect (also called Western (I)jekavian);
  Eastern Herzegovinian dialect (also called Neo-Ijekavian);
  Užican dialect (also called Zlatibor dialect);
  Šumadija–Vojvodina dialect (also called Younger Ekavian);
  Smederevo–Vršac dialect.
caption: Map of Shtokavian dialects