Concept

Serbo-Croatian

Overview

Serbo-Croatian, also known as Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), is a Western South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.

The western Balkans' turbulent history, particularly due to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, led to a complex dialectal and religious mosaic. Due to population migrations, Shtokavian became the most widespread supradialect in the region, encroaching westward into the area previously dominated by Chakavian and Kajkavian. Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs differ in religion and were historically often part of different cultural spheres, although large portions of these populations lived side by side under foreign rule. During that period, the language was referred to by various names, such as "Slavic" in general, or "Serbian", "Croatian" or "Bosnian" in particular. In a classicizing manner, it was also referred to as "Illyrian".

The standardization of Serbo-Croatian was initiated in the mid-19th-century Vienna Literary Agreement by Croatian and Serbian writers and philologists, decades before a Yugoslav state was established. From the outset, literary Serbian and Croatian exhibited slight differences, although both were based on the same Shtokavian dialect—Eastern Herzegovinian. In the 20th century, Serbo-Croatian served as the lingua franca of the country of Yugoslavia, being the sole official language in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (when it was called "Serbo-Croato-Slovenian"), and afterwards the official language of four out of six republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The breakup of Yugoslavia influenced language attitudes, leading to the ethnic and political division of linguistic identity. Since then, Bosnian has likewise been established as an official standard in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and efforts to codify a separate Montenegrin standard continue.

Like other South Slavic languages, Serbo-Croatian has a relatively simple phonology, with the common five-vowel system and twenty-five consonants. Its grammar evolved from Common Slavic, with complex inflection, preserving seven grammatical cases in nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. Verbs exhibit imperfective or perfective aspect, with a moderately complex tense system. Serbo-Croatian is a pro-drop language with flexible word order, subject–verb–object being the default. It can be written in either the Latin (Gaj's Latin alphabet) or Cyrillic script (Serbian Cyrillic alphabet), and the orthography is highly phonemic in all standards. Despite the many linguistic similarities among the standard varieties, each possesses distinctive traits, although these differences remain minimal.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest integration. How small is the degree of this integration, however, when compared with that reached in well-developed languages is shown both by the great length of the compound words used for things and acts of constant…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
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These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct succession without any intermediate inflectional elements to modify their meaning. Philologists usually call such languages 'root-languages,' because a sound complex that carries the essential meaning of a word, apart from all modifying elements, is called by their science a verbal root.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
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MARCH 15th, 1852. Bohemia and Croatia (another disjected member of the Slavonic family, acted upon by the Hungarian, as Bohemia by the German) were the homes of what is called on the European continent "Panslavism." Neither Bohemia nor Croatia was strong enough to exist as a nation by herself. Their respective nationalities, gradually undermined by the action of historical causes that inevitably absorbs into a more…
Friedrich Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution
States what Serbo-Croatian is.
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