“Serbo-Croatian” in the 20th century and after

Politically, Serbia freed itself from Turkey gradually over the 19th century, while most of Croatia remained in the Austro-Hungarian Empire until World War I. At the war’s end in 1918, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro were put together to form a single country, named first the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes and later Yugoslavia. To further emphasize unity, government policy was to downplay Serb-Croatian language differences, and the kingdom even championed a joint “Serb-Croatian-Slovene” language, though Slovene was then (and remains) quite a different tongue.

During World War II Yugoslavia was partly occupied by Axis powers and partly held by a Croat pro-Axis state, which proclaimed an exclusively Croatian language. In 1945 the victorious communist-led Partisans under Josip Broz Tito reestablished Yugoslavia. The new government at first treated Croatian and Serbian as separate languages, alongside Slovene and newly standardized Macedonian. But soon it began pressing for a unified Serbo-Croatian (or Croato-Serbian). In practice Croats went on using the Latin alphabet and some—but not all—of their specifically Croatian words, while Serbs used both Latin and Cyrillic and were tolerant of words of foreign origin.

After the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, each of the new countries began setting its own standards of language usage, and the term Serbo-Croatian dropped out of official use. In language studies it is sometimes still used by authors outside the region, but BCS (meaning “Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian”) and, later, BCMS have also become popular. In Serbia the language is called Serbian, and Cyrillic writing is being encouraged at the expense of Latin. In Croatia there is only Croatian; purism, including the practice of proscribing certain words because of their real or alleged Serbian origin, was strong in the 1990s, though somewhat weaker after 2000. The standardizers of Croatian no longer consult Serbian scholars, nor do linguists in Serbia seek input from Croatia.

Montenegro, in its 2007 constitution, proclaimed Montenegrin as the country’s official language, although Serbian, Bosnian, Albanian, and Croatian were also given official status. Some scholars hoped to differentiate Montenegrin from Serbian by adding two or three new letters to the alphabet for specifically Montenegrin consonants, but those are not widely used. In practice, Montenegro’s vocabulary is that of Serbia and Cyrillic writing is favoured over Latin, but, unlike Serbian usage, Montenegrin usage maintains the aforementioned je, ije pronunciation.

Of the former Yugoslavian states, Bosnia and Herzegovina has the most complex linguistic situation. Given its mixed population (some Croats, more Serbs, and still more Bosniaks), the 1995 Dayton Accords provided for Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian versions of official documents. Those in practice differ only in a few words and in alphabet (Cyrillic for Bosnian Serbs, Latin for others). Many people in Bosnia and Herzegovina claim to speak Bosnian (whether or not they spell according to official Bosnian standards), but language standardizers both in Croatia and in Serbia insist that if there is such a phenomenon, only Bosniaks would use it and therefore it should be called Bosniak.

In the 21st century, then, two well-delineated standard languages exist (Croatian and Serbian) and two more are taking shape (Bosnian and Montenegrin). Educated speakers from any of the countries can converse with full understanding, hindered only by a few everyday words and technical terms (much like British boot and treacle versus American trunk [of a car] and molasses). Accordingly, some argue, they are speaking one language. When writing, however, one cannot follow Serbian and Croatian, or Montenegrin and Bosnian, language standards simultaneously, so in practice no joint standard exists.

Croatian and Serbian alphabets

The Croatian and Serbian alphabets are shown in the table.