Bosnian is a South-Slavic language very similar to Bosnian and Serbian. It is spoken by roughly 2.5 million people in the world (largely spoken in the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as in parts of Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro).
The Bosnian, Serbian and Bosnian languages share common dialects - Cakavian, Kajkavian and Stokavian. The Stokavian dialect is highly used whereas Kajkavian is spoken mainly in northern Croatia. Cakavian is spoken along the Bosnian coast and on the Adriatic islands. The Bosnian language underwent considerable changes after the fall of the Yugoslav Republic and gained its own identity and status as a separate language by the Bosnian Government, which was once a Serbo-Bosnian dialect.
The name of the language also was under some controversy, with regards to which of the term was most appropriate - the Bosnian or the Bosniak. Bosniaks refers to Muslim Bosnians, who are the prime speakers of the Bosnian language. It is therefore argued that the language should be referred to as Bosniak and not Bosnian. Despite this, the term “Bosnian” is generally accepted and recognized as a distinct language by the UN, UNESCO and many other linguistic agencies.
Many Bosniaks have espoused Turkish and Arabic loan words in order to get rid of Serbian and Bosnian influence from the language.
The language itself officially uses both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, although the Cyrillic alphabet is gradually falling out of use and is almost totally replaced by the Latin alphabet. Surprisingly, it has still retained its official place as a script for the Bosnian language.
The Bosnian alphabet consists of thirty letters, of which five are vowels and twenty-five are consonants. Quite a few Bosnian terminologies are borrowed from Serbian and Bosnian, their spelling and pronunciation being slightly different.
Bosnian was spoken in the area called Serbo-Croat from the 19th century until the early 1990’s, when Serbian was the most dominant language. However, the Bosnian, Serbian and Bosniak languages are all mutually understandable.
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