Comparison of standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian
Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are different national variants and official registers of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language. History. In socialist Yugoslavia, the language was approached as a pluricentric language with two regional normative varieties—Eastern (used in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina by all ethnicities, either with the Ekavian or the Ijekavian accent) and Western (used in Croatia by all ethnicities, the Ijekavian accent only). However, due to discontent in Croatian intellectual circles, beginning in the late 1960s Croatian cultural workers started to refer to the language exclusively as  'the Croatian literary language', or sometimes 'the Croatian or Serbian language' (these two names were also prescribed in the Croatian constitution of 1974), as was common before Yugoslavia. The language was regarded as one common language with different variants and dialects. The unity of the language was emphasised, making the differences not an indicator of linguistic divisions, but rather factors enriching the 'common language' diversity. In addition, Yugoslavia had two other official languages on the federal level, Slovenian and Macedonian, reflecting Yugoslavia's acceptance of diversity with regards to language use. No attempts were made to assimilate those languages into  the Serbo-Croatian language. With the breakup of the Federation, in search of additional indicators of independent and separate national identities, language became a political instrument in virtually all of the new republics. With a boom of neologisms in Croatia, an additional emphasis on Turkisms in the Muslim parts of Bosnia and a privileged position of the Cyrillic script in Serb-inhabited parts of the new states, every state and entity showed a 'nationalisation' of the language. The language in Bosnia started developing independently after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992. The independent development of the language in Montenegro  became a topic among some Montenegrin academics in the 1990s. Serbian and Bosnian standards varieties tend to be inclusive, i.e. to accept a wider range of idioms and to use loanwords (German and Turkish), whereas the Croatian language policy is more purist and prefers neologisms to loan-words, as well as the re-use of neglected older words. Yet there is criticism of the puristic language policy even in Croatia, as exemplified by linguist Snježana Kordić. In 2017, numerous prominent writers, scientists, journalists, activists and other public figures from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia signed the Declaration on  the Common Language, faced with "the negative social, cultural and economic consequences of political manipulations of language in the current language policies of the four countries", which "include using language as an argument justifying the segregation of schoolchildren in some multiethnic environments, unnecessary "translation“ in administration or the media, inventing differences where they do not exist, bureaucratic coercion, as well as censorship (and necessarily also self-censorship), where linguistic expression is imposed as a criterion of ethnonational affiliation and a means of affirming political loyalty". Despite the 'nationalisation' of the language in the four countries, "lexical differences between the ethnic  variants are extremely limited, even when compared with those between closely related Slavic languages (such as standard Czech and Slovak, Bulgarian and Macedonian), and grammatical differences are even less pronounced. More importantly, complete understanding between the ethnic variants of the standard language makes translation and second language teaching impossible", which all means that it is still a pluricentric language. "An examination of all the major 'levels' of language show that BCS is clearly a single language with a single grammatical system." Writing. Script. Though all of the language variants could theoretically use either, the scripts differ: Phonemes. All standard variants  have the same set of 30 regular phonemes, so the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian Latin and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets map one to one with one another and with the phoneme inventory. Some linguists analyse the yat reflexes and , commonly realised as in Croatian and Bosnian dialects, as a separate phoneme – "jat diphthong" – or even two phonemes, one short and one long. There are even several proposals by Croatian linguists for an orthography reform concerning these two diphthongs, but they have not been seriously considered for implementation. The ongoing standardisation of Montenegrin has introduced two new letters, and , for the sounds and  respectively. These are optional spellings of the digraphs and . Critics argue that and are merely allophones of and in Herzegovinian dialects such as Montenegrin, and therefore the new letters are not required for an adequate orthography. Most dialects of Serbia originally lack the phoneme , instead having , , or nothing (silence). was introduced with language unification, and the Serbian standard allows for some doublets such as "snaja"–"snaha" and "hajde"–"ajde". However, in other words, especially those of foreign origin, is mandatory. In some regions of Croatia and Bosnia, the sounds for letters (realised as in most other dialects) and merged or nearly merged , usually into . The same happened with their voiced counterparts, i.e. () and () merged into . As result, speakers of those dialects often have difficulties distinguishing these sounds. Orthography. The Serbian variety usually phonetically transcribes foreign names and words (although both transcription and transliteration are allowed), whereas the Croatian standard usually transliterates. Bosnian accepts both models, but transliteration is often preferred. Also, when the subject of the future tense is omitted, producing a reversal of the infinitive and auxiliary "ću", only the final "i" of the infinitive is orthographically elided in Croatian and Bosnian, whereas in Serbian the two have merged into a  single word: Grammar. Accentuation. In general, the Shtokavian dialects that represent the foundation of the four standard varieties have four pitch accents on stressed syllables: falling tone on a short vowel, written e.g. in dictionaries; rising tone on a short vowel, written e.g. ; falling tone on a long vowel, written e.g. ; and rising tone on a long vowel, written e.g. . In addition, the following unstressed vowel may be either short, , or long, . In declension and verb conjugation, accent shifts, both by type and position, are very frequent. The distinction between four accents and preservation of post accent lengths is common  in vernaculars of western Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in parts of Serbia, as well as in parts of Croatia with a strong Serb presence. In addition, a distinct characteristics of some vernaculars is stress shift to proclitics, e.g. phrase "u Bosni" ("in Bosnia") will be pronounced instead of as in northern parts of Serbia. The northern vernaculars in Serbia also preserve the four-accent system, but the unstressed lengths have been shortened or disappeared in some positions. However, the shortening of post-accent lengths is in progress in all Shtokavian vernaculars, even in those most conservative in Montenegro. Stress shift  to enclitics is, however, in northern Serbia rare and mostly limited to negative verb constructs ("ne znam" = "I don't know" > ). The situation in Croatia, is however, different. A large proportion of speakers of Croatian, especially those coming from Zagreb, do not distinguish between rising and falling accents. This is considered to be a feature of the Zagreb dialect, which has strong Kajkavian influence, rather than standard Croatian. Regardless of vernacular differences, all three standard varieties exclusively promote the Neo-Shtokavian four-accentual system. Both dialects that are considered to be the basis of standard Serbian (Eastern Herzegovinian  and Šumadija-Vojvodina dialects) have four accents. Morphology. There are three principal "pronunciations" ("izgovori"/изговори) of the Shtokavian dialect that differ in their reflexes of the Proto-Slavic vowel jat. Illustrated by the Common Slavic word for "child", "dětę", they are: The Serbian language recognises Ekavian and Ijekavian as equally valid pronunciations, whereas Croatian and Bosnian accept only the Ijekavian pronunciation. In Bosnia and Herzegovina (regardless of the official language) and in Montenegro, the Ijekavian pronunciation is used almost exclusively. Ikavian pronunciation is nonstandard, and is limited to dialectal use in Dalmatia, Lika, Istria, central Bosnia (area between Vrbas and Bosna ), Western Herzegovina, Bosanska Krajina, Slavonia and northern Bačka (Vojvodina). So, for example: A few Croatian linguists have tried to explain the following differences in morphological structure for some words, with the introduction of a new vowel, "jat diphthong". This is not the opinion of most linguists. Sometimes this leads to confusion: Serbian poticati (to stem from) is in Croatian and Bosnian "to encourage". Croatian and Bosnian "to stem from" is potjecati, whereas Serbian for "encourage" is podsticati. Standard Bosnian allows both variants, and ambiguities are resolved by preferring the Croatian variant; this is a general practice for Serbian–Croatian ambiguities . The phoneme /x/ (written as "h") has been volatile in eastern South Slavic dialects. In Serbian and some Croatian dialects (including some of those in Slavonia), it has been replaced with /j/, /v/, or elided, and subsequent standardisation sanctioned those forms: However, /x/ and /f/ have been kept in many words as a distinct feature of Bosnian speech and language tradition, particularly under influence of Turkish and Arabic, and even introduced in some places where it etymologically did not exist. Those forms were in the mid 1990s also accepted in the orthography of the Bosnian language. However, 2018, in the  new issue of the "Orthography of the Bosnian language", words without the phoneme /x/ (written as "h") are accepted due to their prevalence in language practice. Because the Ijekavian pronunciation is common to all official standards, it will be used for examples on this page. Other than this, examples of different morphology are: Internationalisms. Also many internationalisms and transliterations are different: Historically, modern-age internationalisms entered Bosnian and Croatian mostly through German and Italian, whereas they entered Serbian through French and Russian, so different localisation patterns were established based on those languages. Also, Greek borrowings came to Serbian directly, but  through Latin into Croatian: Most of terms for chemical elements are different: for international names, Bosnian and Croatian use "-ij" where Serbian has "-ijum" ("uranij"–"uranijum"). In some native names, Croatian have "-ik" where Serbian has -(o)nik ("kisik"–"kiseonik" 'oxygen', "vodik"–"vodonik" 'hydrogen') and Bosnian accepts all variants. Yet others are totally different ("dušik"–"azot" 'nitrogen', "kositar"–"kalaj" 'tin'). Some element names are the same: "srebro" (silver), "zlato" (gold), "bakar" (copper). Some other imported words differ by grammatical gender, feminine words having an "-a" suffix and masculine words having a zero-suffix: Pronouns. In Serbian and Bosnian, the pronoun "what" is "što" when used as  a relative, but "šta" when used as an interrogative; the latter applies also to relative sentences with interrogative meaning. Croatian uses "što" in all contexts (but in colloquial speech, "šta" is often used). This is applicable only to the nominative and the accusative – in all other cases, the standards have the same forms: "čega", "čemu" etc. for "što". In Croatian, the pronoun "who" has the form "tko", whereas in Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin it has "ko", but again, in colloquial speech, the initial "t" is usually omitted. The declension is the same: "kome", "koga", etc. In addition, Croatian uses "komu  as an alternative form in the dative case. The locative pronoun kamo" is only used in Croatian: Syntax. Infinitive versus subjunctive. With modal verbs such as "ht(j)eti" (want) or "moći" (can), the infinitive is prescribed in Croatian, whereas the construction "da" (that/to) + present tense is preferred in Serbian. This subjunctive of sorts is possibly an influence of the Balkan sprachbund. Again, both alternatives are present and allowed in Bosnian (the first one is preferred in orthography, the latter is more common in colloquial language). Here is an example of a yat reflection that is the same in everything  but the syntax: The sentence "I want to do that" could be translated with any of This difference partly extends to the future tense, which in Serbo-Croatian is formed in a similar manner to English, using (elided) present of verb ""ht(j)eti" → "hoću"/"hoćeš"/… > "ću"/"ćeš"/…" as auxiliary verb. Here, the infinitive is formally required in both variants: However, when "da"+present is used instead, it can additionally express the subject's will or intention to perform the action: This form is more frequently used in Serbia and Bosnia. The nuances in meaning between the two constructs can be slight or  even lost (especially in Serbian dialects), in similar manner as the "shall/will" distinction varies across English dialects. Overuse of "da"+present is regarded as Germanism in Serbian linguistic circles, and it can occasionally lead to awkward sentences. Interrogative constructs. In interrogative and relative constructs, standard Croatian prescribes using the interrogative participle "li" after the verb, whereas standard Serbian also allows forms with "da li". (A similar situation exists in French, where a question can be formed either by inversion or using "est-ce que", and can be stretched in English with modal verbs): In addition, non-standard "je li" ("Is  it?"), usually elided to "je l' ", is vernacular for forming all kinds of questions, e.g. "Je l' možeš?". In standard language, it is used only in questions involving auxiliary verb "je" (="is"): In summary, the English sentence "I want to know whether I'll start working" would "typically" read: although many in-between combinations could be met in vernacular speech, depending on speaker's dialect, idiolect, or even mood. The Croatian avoidance of "da li" is largely an expression of prescriptivism. In everyday speech in Croatia, "da li" is used, in fact, extensively, but avoided in written language. Trebati . In formal Croatian, verb "trebati" ("need" or "should") is transitive, as in English. In Serbian and Bosnian, it is impersonal, like the French "il faut", or the English construct "is necessary (to)"; the grammatical subject is either omitted ("it"), or presents the object of needing; the person that needs something is an indirect grammatical object, in the dative case. The latter usage is, however, also encountered in Croatian, especially in spoken form.): Vocabulary. Examples. The greatest differences between the standards is in vocabulary. However, most words are well understood, and even occasionally used, in the other standards. In most cases , common usage favours one variant and the other(s) are regarded as "imported", archaic, dialectal, or simply more rarely used. Note that there are only a few differences that can cause confusion, for example the verb "ličiti" means "to look like" in Serbian and Bosnian, but in Croatian it is "sličiti"; "ličiti" means "to paint (a house)". However, "ličiti" is often used Croatian in the meaning of "to look like". The word "bilo" means "white" in the Ikavian accent, "pulse" in official Croatian, and "was" in all official languages, although it is not so confusing when pronounced because of different accentuation  ("bîlo" or "bílo" = white, "bı̏lo" = pulse, "bílo" = was). In Serbian and Bosnian, the word "izvanredan" (extraordinary) has only the positive meaning (excellent), "vanredan" being used for "unusual" or "out of order"; however, only "izvanredan" is used in Croatian in both contexts. Also note that in most cases Bosnian officially allows almost all of the listed variants in the name of "language richness", and ambiguities are resolved by preferring the Croatian variant. Bosnian vocabulary writers based their decisions on usage of certain words in literary works by Bosnian authors. Names of the months. The months have Slavic-derived  names in Croatian, wheres Serbian and Bosnian have almost the same set of Latin-derived names as English. The Slavic-derived names may also be used in Bosnian, but the Latinate names are preferred. The Latin-derived names of the months are well understood in Croatia and are used in several fixed expressions such as "Prvi Maj" (May 1), "Prvi April" (April Fools' Day) or "Oktobarska revolucija" (October Revolution). In spoken Croatian and in western Bosnia it is common to refer to a month by its number. Therefore, many speakers refer to the month of May as "peti mjesec  (the fifth month"). Saying "sedmi peti" ("seventh of fifth") would be the equivalent of May 7. Language samples. The following samples, taken from article 1 to 6 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are "synonymous texts, translated as literally as possible" in the sense of Ammon designed to demonstrate the differences between the standard varieties treated in this article in a continuous text.