Bosnia and Herzegovina Languages

The Bosnian constitution does not state the country’s official language, but a majority of the people speak Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian. The constitution of the country is provided in all three languages. Bosnian is spoken by a slim majority (52.86%) as the mother tongue. It is considered to be a South Slavic language and a variant of Serbo-Croatian. It uses both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. There are 27 letters in the Bosnian language.

A majority of Bosniaks (52.86%) consider Bosnian to be their mother tongue. 30.76% speak Serbian, while 14.6% use Croatian. A majority of the population can also use at least two of the languages fluently. Apart from the three main languages, several other minority languages are used. They include Czech, Italian, German, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Slovene.

In the 20th century, Bosnian was redeveloped and became closer to the Croatian language than to Serbian. Modern Bosnian has more loanwords than the previous dialect and the phoneme /x/ (letter h) was reintroduced as a distinct feature as a vernacular Bosniak speech.

There are several minority languages in Bosnia. The 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages warrants Bosnia to recognize Czech, Italian: German, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Slovak, and Slovene as the minority languages in the country. The German minority in the country are descendants of Donauschwaben who established settlements when the Habsburg monarchy took control of the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire