Origins

Bosnian belongs to a branch of South Slavic languages within the Slavic linguistic family. It suffered a strong influence from Arab languages, mainly in its lexical aspect and due to religious reasons (with a considerable Muslim part of the population). Though today Bosnian uses the Latin alphabet, it was once based on a specific Cyrillic script – there are documents revealing the use of so-called 'Bosnian Cyrillic' from the 11 and 12th Centuries. This latter fact proves the separate development of Bosnian and its relative diachronic autonomy.

Official Language

Bosnian is the official language of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and also at a municipal level in the region of Sandžak, which encompasses some parts of Serbia and Montenegro. A public discussion has been held of whether the name of the language should be 'Bosnian' – thus being called all inhabitants of the state, or 'Bosniak' – the designation of the Muslim part of the population, which acknowledges this language as their mother tongue. Linguists today say that the official designation of Bosnian was accepted after a 'hidden political maneuver'.

Brief History

Written documents trace Bosnian back to the 11th Century, and were written in a specific Cyrillic variety, which was still called Bosnian Cyrillic at the time. Later, Bosnian adopted Latin alphabet.

An ironic fact about Bosnian is that it somehow missed the right moment to become an autonomous and influential language, in the 19th Century, when it was fully used by its neighbors, the Serbs and Croats. At that time, the elite of Bosnia spoke mainly in Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and literature was mainly written in those languages. In fact, the whole process of national auto-identification came to proceed a bit slower than with Serbs and Croats, which some explain by the fact that the latter are Christian, while Bosnians are mainly Muslim, which didn’t force them to oppose their national identity to the Turkish Empire, which ruled the whole area at the time.

In the 20th Century, another big event influenced the linguistic map of the Balkans – the existence of a united Yugoslavia. The official language of the state was declared to be Serb-Croat and, surprisingly, after the split of the republics of Yugoslavia, only Bosnia and Herzegovina seemed to really inherit the hybrid language, while Serbs got back to pure Serbian and Croatians quickly proceeded to the purification of Croatian.

Today, signs of ‘going back to the source’ are becoming increasingly visible in the Bosnian tongue. The process of national identification is quite stronger now, and linguistically, re-adopting some phonetic and lexical features from the original Bosnian.

Did you know?

Bosnian is official not only in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but in some municipalities of Serbia and Montenegro. Typical characteristics of Bosnian are the specifically pronounced consonant 'h' as well as the use of Arabic borrowings, among others. These and other original features of the language are becoming more and more frequently used in the endeavor of Bosnians to find their inner national independence. In fact, the Bosnian language existed ten centuries ago. Then, it used the Cyrillic. Today, using the Latin alphabet, it belongs to the South Slavic languages.