One speech under three names: the culture of Bosnia and Herzegovina

How one speech came to carry three names

The 2013 census asked every resident for a mother tongue. 52.86% answered Bosnian, 30.76% Serbian and 14.6% Croatian, and 1.57% named another language. Britannica treats the three as one set of mutually intelligible languages, known collectively as Serbo-Croatian and called Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian "depending on the speaker's ethnic and political affiliation". The varieties spoken inside Bosnia and Herzegovina differ in some details of pronunciation and vocabulary, and Britannica finds them closer to one another than any of them is to the speech of Belgrade or Zagreb. The collective name has no formal standing in the country.

The state constitution names no official language at all. The Dayton Agreement was drawn up in four versions, in Bosnian, Croatian, English and Serbian, which the academics Hilary Footitt and Michael Kelly read as "de facto recognition of three official languages". In 2000 the Constitutional Court ruled that the Entity constitutions were incompatible with the state one, because the Federation had recognised only Bosnian and Croatian and Republika Srpska only Serbian. Both texts were changed, and all three languages were made official in both Entities.

Michael Kelly and Catherine Baker describe the result as "the symbolic assertion of national identity over the pragmatism of mutual intelligibility". Naming the language has become a way of naming the people a speaker belongs to.

Script works the same way. A Latin and a Cyrillic alphabet have both been taught in schools and used in the press, and Britannica records that the nationalism of the 1990s aligned Serbs with Cyrillic and Croats and Bosniaks with Latin. The older record is less tidy. The Charter of Ban Kulin, a trade agreement with the Republic of Dubrovnik and the first written document to describe Bosnia's borders between the Drina, the Sava and the Una, is written in Bosnian Cyrillic and calls the people of the country Bosnians.

Beyond the three, Bosnia and Herzegovina recognises minority languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages of 1992. Its sixteen entries include Albanian, Romani, Turkish, Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian, and one entry covers the two Jewish languages, Yiddish and Ladino. The German speakers on it are mostly descended from Danube Swabians who settled after the Habsburg monarchy took the region from the Ottoman Empire.

Why religion marks the line between neighbours

Britannica traces Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats to the same South Slav heritage and names religious origin or affiliation as the main cultural difference between them. It attributes this partly to the Ottoman Empire, which allowed autonomous religious communities to coexist under its rule. "Serb" and "Croat" were first the names of two South Slav tribes, then mainly the names of the people of Serbia and Croatia. In the nineteenth century nationalist movements encouraged Orthodox Bosnians to be labelled Serbs and Catholic Bosnians to be labelled Croats. A national sense developed among Bosnian Muslims later, and in the twentieth century "Muslim" came into use as an ethnic label as well as a religious one. "Bosniak" replaced it in the 1990s.

The census of 2013 puts figures on how closely the three markers coincide.

On no row do the three columns differ by more than three percentage points. Atheists and agnostics together made up 1.1% of the 2013 count.

The census itself is contested. Political disagreement prevented any count between 1991 and 2013; one was planned for 2011 and then for 2012, and it took until October 2013 to hold it. Republika Srpska's statistical office and Bosnian Serb politicians reject the results because they include residents who were not permanently present. Eurostat concluded in May 2016 that the methodology of the state statistics agency was in line with international recommendations. This catalogue records both positions.

Identity and observance are measured separately. Britannica finds that the end of communism, the revival of nationalism and the war all raised the standing of religion in the three populations, and that attendance at church and mosque services has stayed low. A survey in 2012 found 54% of Bosnia's Muslims describing themselves as non-denominational and 38% as Sunni.

What medieval gravestones and bridges record

The stećci are monolithic stone tombstones, carved from the second half of the twelfth century to the sixteenth and most intensively in the fourteenth and fifteenth. UNESCO inscribed them in 2016 as a serial property of 28 component sites and about 4,000 tombstones spread across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. It estimates the whole surviving corpus at more than 70,000 stones at more than 3,300 sites. They take the form of slabs, chests, gabled roofs, pillars and crosses, and their reliefs carry decorative and religious motifs as well as scenes from everyday life.

The reason UNESCO gives for listing them is their use across confessions. All three medieval Christian communities buried their dead under stećci: the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church and the Church of Bosnia, which lasted about three centuries and ended in the second half of the fifteenth. The inscription also records that their reliefs and inscriptions have influenced contemporary literature and art in all four countries that hold them.

Mostar's bridge comes from the Ottoman period. The settlement grew in the fifteenth century at a river crossing on the Neretva, and its name, first recorded in 1474, comes from the mostari, the keepers of the bridge. The Old Bridge of 1566 was designed by the architect Hajruddin after a design by his teacher Sinan. UNESCO's description of the old town sets mosques, churches and synagogues side by side and calls its architecture "a symbol of tolerance". Artillery fire destroyed the bridge in 1993. It was rebuilt in 2004, the Old Bridge Area was inscribed in 2005, and UNESCO now describes the reconstruction as a symbol of reconciliation.

The Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad followed onto the World Heritage List in 2007. The National Museum in Sarajevo, opened in 1888, holds stećci among its collections, along with the Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish illuminated codex from Spain, and Hval's Codex, a Bosnian liturgical book of the early fifteenth century.

Which crafts cross the lines between communities

Two Bosnian crafts are on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and the Konjic file describes a practice that crosses the divisions of the census.

Konjic woodcarving, inscribed in 2017, is a hand-carving tradition of the Konjic municipality. The workshops produce furniture, whole carved interiors and small decorative objects, recognisable by their motifs. UNESCO's file describes a craft "practised by different ethnic and confessional groups" and followed both as a trade and as a hobby. Family-run workshops carry most of the work of training apprentices, and the skill passes from generation to generation within families as well.

Zmijanje embroidery, inscribed in 2014, is worked by the women of the Zmijanje villages on wedding dresses, scarves, garments and bed linen. Its mark is a deep blue thread, dyed with vegetable dyes, stitched into improvised geometric shapes. The richness of a woman's designs has signalled her standing in the village. The embroidery is done in groups, with singing and conversation, and students learn by watching experienced embroiderers combine fixed elements into new variations. UNESCO notes that displaced people wear embroidered garments as an expression of national and local identity.

The two files were documented from different sides of the Entity line. The film in the Konjic file is credited to the Federal Ministry of Culture and Sport of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the photographs in the Zmijanje file to the Museum of Republic of Srpska.

How music travels between the three peoples

The sevdalinka is an emotional, melancholic folk song from the Ottoman period. Its subjects are love and loss, the death of someone close and heartbreak. It was sung to the saz, a Turkish string instrument, which the accordion later replaced; a modern arrangement puts a singer in front of accordion, snare drum, upright bass, guitars, clarinets and violins. UNESCO added it to the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2024.

The rural forms belong to no single community. Ganga is shouted and polyphonic, and ravne pjesme, or flat song, is a second rural style. The instruments include a droneless bagpipe, a wooden flute and the šargija, a long-necked lute. In the villages, and in Herzegovina above all, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats all play the gusle, a bowed instrument used to recite epic poems. Ladino folk songs survive from the country's Jewish population.

Bosnian roots music comes from Central Bosnia, Posavina, the Drina valley and Kalesija, and is usually played by a singer with two violinists and a šargija player. The bands first appeared around the First World War and grew popular in the 1960s. The music is learned by ear, often within one family, and was enjoyed by all three peoples. Kalesija holds a festival of it every year.

Sarajevo in the 1970s added a rock scene. Britannica attributes it to an atmosphere less repressive than that of Belgrade, and Bijelo Dugme, the band of the period, drew a large following throughout the country. Zabranjeno Pušenje, Divlje Jagode and Crvena Jabuka came from the same city. During the war of 1992 to 1995 international artists toured the country for humanitarian causes.

How Bosnian writers and directors wrote the country

The Franciscan writer Matija Divković is counted as the founder of modern Bosnian literature. Ivo Andrić, born in Dolac, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961; his novel Na Drini ćuprija, The Bridge on the Drina, appeared in 1945, and in 1958 the Association of Writers of Yugoslavia made him its first ever Nobel nominee. Meša Selimović, the poets Mak Dizdar, Aleksa Šantić and Jovan Dučić, and later Aleksandar Hemon, Miljenko Jergović and Abdulah Sidran belong to the same record. The National Theatre opened in Sarajevo in 1919 with the playwright Branislav Nušić as its first director.

Painting took its modern form under Austro-Hungarian rule. The occupation of 1878 brought what the sources call a renaissance of Bosnian painting, and the first artists trained at European academies appeared at the start of the twentieth century: Gabrijel Jurkić, Petar Šain, Roman Petrović and Lazar Drljača. After the Second World War Mersad Berber and Safet Zec came to prominence. Ars Aevi, a museum of contemporary art, was founded in Sarajevo in 2007.

Sarajevo was a film centre in the Yugoslav period. Emir Kusturica's Do You Remember Dolly Bell? won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1981. Danis Tanović won an Oscar in 2002 for No Man's Land, about the war of 1992 to 1995, and the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize in 2016 for Death in Sarajevo. Jasmila Žbanić's Quo Vadis, Aida?, made in 2020, was nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA. The Sarajevo Film Festival was founded in 1995, while the war was still being fought, and screens at the National Theatre and the open-air theatre Metalac.

How sport and broadcasting divided after the war

Football reached Bosnia in 1903. Britannica records that the war of the 1990s split the league into three divisions, Bosniak, Serb and Croat, whose teams rarely played anyone outside their own allegiance. The Croat and Bosniak divisions agreed to play one another in 2000 and the Serb league joined them in 2002. Basketball went through the same division in the 1990s. The national football team reached its first major tournament at the 2014 World Cup with a squad drawn from all of the country's peoples.

Sarajevo held the Winter Olympics in February 1984. During the war the ski runs built for the Games were used as firing ranges for Serb and Yugoslav army artillery. A national Olympic committee formed in 1992 and the International Olympic Committee recognised it in 1993; the country's first appearance was at Barcelona in 1992, and an interethnic team competed at Lillehammer in 1994 while the war went on. The sitting volleyball team won Paralympic gold in 2004 and 2012 with players many of whom had lost legs in the war.

Broadcasting followed the Entity line. After the war the Federation and Republika Srpska each set up public radio and television, and private stations operate beside them. The Sarajevo dailies Dnevni Avaz and Oslobodjenje and the Banja Luka daily Nezavisne Novine circulate among the newspapers.

What Bosnian kitchens and coffee houses serve

Bosnian cooking has Ottoman and Austrian roots. Almost 500 years of Ottoman administration tie it to Turkish, Greek and other Mediterranean cooking, and Austrian rule left Central European dishes beside them. Most dishes are boiled, spices go in small quantities, and sauces are mostly the juices of the vegetables. The staples are tomatoes, potatoes, onions, peppers, cabbage, beans, plums and pavlaka, a local cream, with beef and lamb as the usual meats. Ćevapi, small rolls of seasoned minced beef and lamb grilled and served in a bread pocket, count as a national dish in both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. Burek, dolma, sarma, pilav, goulash and ajvar sit beside them with baklava-type cakes.

Drink divides by region. Herzegovina's climate suits vines and its distillers make loza, a spirit compared with Italian grappa, while plum rakija and apple jabukovača come from the north. Plums also go into thick jam.

Coffee has its own places. Kafane, the traditional coffeehouses, and kafići, the modern café-bars, are common in every city and are where people meet, and Bosnian coffee arrives in a džezva with rahat lokum and sugar cubes. In summer people stroll on the town korzo, the promenade.