Bosnian

Why Bosnians were late to codify a standard

Serbs and Croats codified their standards in the 1800s and Bosnians did not, although their everyday speech was more uniform than either. Two reasons are given. The Bosnian elite, tied closely to Ottoman life, wrote mostly in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish, and vernacular literature in the Arebica script was thin. National emancipation came later than among Serbs and Croats, and religion rather than language decided who belonged to which group, so a Bosnian language project drew little interest.

The standard came in the 1990s and 2000s. The Pravopis bosanskog jezika, published in Sarajevo in 1996, set out its marks: the h restored in words like kahva, deliberate use of Oriental vocabulary, and the future tense spelled kupit ću as in Croatian, where Serbian writes kupiću with the same pronunciation. The 2018 edition accepts spellings without the h, because speakers use them.

Who called the language Bosnian before then

The name is old. Constantine the Philosopher listed a Bosnian language beside Serbian and Croatian in a work written between 1423 and 1426. The Franciscan Matija Divković, in 1611, described his translation as made from Latin into "the real and true Bosnian language". The Jesuit grammarian Bartol Kašić called the language of his 1640 Ritual rimski either naški or bosanski, and Jakov Mikalja's dictionary of 1649 judged Bosnian the most beautiful of the Illyrian languages.

What divides Bosnian from Bosniak

Some Croats and Serbs call the language Bosniak, bošnjački, on the ground that Bosnian seems to claim the speech of every Bosnian, a claim Bosnian Croats and Serbs reject for their own idioms. Bosniak linguists hold that bosanski is the only legitimate name. The Dayton Accords of 1995 used Bosnian. The constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina said Bosniac language until an amendment of 2002, and the constitution of Republika Srpska refers to "the language spoken by Bosniaks". Croatia's statistics office used Bosniak in the 2001 census and Bosnian in 2011.

How Bosnian fits the shared standard

Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin all rest on the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect of Shtokavian, and the differences between their literary standards are minimal. The Declaration on the Common Language of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins of 2017 described them as one polycentric language. Since the 1990s the labels Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and BCMS have spread, especially in diplomacy. Speakers often avoid the question by calling it naš or naški, a possessive meaning roughly 'of one's own people'.