Bosnian - Worldwide Distribution

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Origins and development

The Bosnian language has its roots in Slavic, which has spread throughout the region since the 6th century. The first known written documents written in an early form of Bosnian date back to the Middle Ages, with the oldest Glagolitic and Bosančica inscriptions known from the 10th and 11th centuries.

During the Middle Ages, the language continued to develop and was known under various names, including "Bosančica", a written form that was mainly used in Bosnia. In the 19th century, the language reform of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić led to a further convergence of the Bosnian language with Serbian and Croatian by creating a standardized version of Serbo-Croatian that was strongly oriented towards the vernacular language.

After the break-up of Yugoslavia, and especially after the Bosnian War (1992-1995), Bosnian was officially recognized as a separate language within Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was partly a political decision, but also reflects the linguistic identity of the Bosniak population.

Distribution Bosnian► Interactive map

CountryOfficial languageDistributionTotal
Bosnia and Herzegovinayes45.3 %1,433,000
Serbiano1.9 %125,000
Montenegrono5.3 %33,000
Kosovono1.7 %27,000
Croatiano0.3 %12,000

Differences to Serbian, Croatian and Serbo-Croatian

Although Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian have many similarities and are often mutually intelligible, there are some differences. The Bosnian language has a number of words that reflect specifically Bosniak cultural and also Islamic influences, including loan words from Turkish and Arabic. In addition, the Bosnian language is distinguished by the use of the Bosnian alphabet, which has some letters that are not used in the other two languages.

The standardization of the language after the war has also led to Bosnian officially using both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, although Latin is predominant in practice. Grammatically and phonetically, the differences between the three languages are relatively minor, but there are noticeable differences in orthography, lexis and some grammatical forms.

Unless otherwise described in the text, this page is about native speakers — not the total number of speakers. How many people understand or speak Bosnian as a subsequently learned language is not the subject of this page. Countries where native speakers make up only a few thousand, or even a few hundred people, or countries with a percentage well below 1% are unlikely to be listed here.

Official language, national language or lingua franca: explanation of frequently used terms

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