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| VOCABULARY DATABASE > BOSNIAN, CROATIAN, OR SERBIAN > INFORMATION |
Serbo-Croatian belongs to the western group of the South Slavic family of languages and is spoken by some 20 million people. There are three slightly different standards for it, named respectively Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, all of which are based on the Štokavian dialect (see here for a map of dialects of Serbo-Croatian).
Standardization of Croatian started in the 16th c., while the first Serbian dictionary and grammar appeared in the 19th c. with the linguistic reform initiated by Vuk Stefanovi´c Karadži´c. Toward the end of the 19th c., efforts to unify both standards were made, but after the breakup of the Yugoslav Federation the three standards are officially treated as separate languages.
Written literature in Croatian dates back to the 9th c., and production in this language has been continuous ever since. Serbian literature flourished from the 12th c., but declined under Ottoman rule (15th-19th). From the 19th c. on, Serbo-Croatian followed major European literary movements.
Serbo-Croatian is an inflected language with seven cases for nouns, three genders, and two numbers. Verbs are conjugated in seven tenses, three moods, and two aspects. It is written in modified forms of the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, between which there is an almost exact correspondence. Serbians use the Cyrillic alphabet, Croatians the Latin alphabet, and Bosnians prefer the Latin alphabet. Old Croatian was also written in the Glagolitic alphabet until the 17th c.
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