Differences between Serbo-Croatian standard varieties

Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are different national variants and official registers of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language.

History

In socialist Yugoslavia, the language was approached as a pluricentric language with two regional normative varieties—Eastern (used in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina by all ethnicities, either with the Ekavian or the Ijekavian accent) and Western (used in Croatia by all ethnicities, the Ijekavian accent only). However, due to discontent in Croatian intellectual circles, beginning in the late 1960s Croatian cultural workers started to refer to the language exclusively as 'the Croatian literary language', or sometimes 'the Croatian or Serbian language' (these two names were also prescribed in the Croatian constitution of 1974), as was common before Yugoslavia. The language was regarded as one common language with different variants and dialects. The unity of the language was emphasised, making the differences not an indicator of linguistic divisions, but rather factors enriching the 'common language' diversity. In addition, Yugoslavia had two other official languages on the federal level, Slovenian and Macedonian, reflecting Yugoslavia's acceptance of diversity with regards to language use. No attempts were made to assimilate those languages into the Serbo-Croatian language.

With the breakup of the Federation, in search of additional indicators of independent and separate national identities, language became a political instrument in virtually all of the new republics. With a boom of neologisms in Croatia, an additional emphasis on Turkisms in the Muslim parts of Bosnia and a privileged position of the Cyrillic script in Serb-inhabited parts of the new states, every state and entity showed a 'nationalisation' of the language. The language in Bosnia started developing independently after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992. The independent development of the language in Montenegro became a topic among some Montenegrin academics in the 1990s.

Serbian and Bosnian standards varieties tend to be inclusive, i.e. to accept a wider range of idioms and to use loanwords (German and Turkish), whereas the Croatian language policy is more purist and prefers neologisms to loan-words, as well as the re-use of neglected older words. Yet there is criticism of the puristic language policy even in Croatia, as exemplified by linguist Snježana Kordić. In 2017, numerous prominent writers, scientists, journalists, activists and other public figures from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia signed the Declaration on the Common Language, faced with "the negative social, cultural and economic consequences of political manipulations of language in the current language policies of the four countries", which "include using language as an argument justifying the segregation of schoolchildren in some multiethnic environments, unnecessary 'translation' in administration or the media, inventing differences where they do not exist, bureaucratic coercion, as well as censorship (and necessarily also self-censorship), where linguistic expression is imposed as a criterion of ethnonational affiliation and a means of affirming political loyalty".

Despite the 'nationalisation' of the language in the four countries, "lexical differences between the ethnic variants are extremely limited, even when compared with those between closely related Slavic languages (such as standard Czech and Slovak, Bulgarian and Macedonian), and grammatical differences are even less pronounced. More importantly, complete understanding between the ethnic variants of the standard language makes translation and second language teaching impossible", which all means that it is still a pluricentric language. "An examination of all the major 'levels' of language show that BCS is clearly a single language with a single grammatical system."

Writing

Script

Though all of the language variants could theoretically use either, the scripts differ:
*Bosnian and Montenegrin officially use both the Latin and Cyrillic scripts, but the Latin one is more in widespread use.
*Croatian exclusively uses the Latin alphabet.
*Serbian uses both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Cyrillic is the official script of the administration in Serbia and Republika Srpska, but the Latin script is the most widely used in media and especially on the Internet.

Phonemes

All standard variants have the same set of 30 regular phonemes, so the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian Latin and Serbian Cyrillic alphabets map one to one with one another and with the phoneme inventory.

Some linguists analyse the yat reflexes and , commonly realised as in Croatian and Bosnian dialects, as a separate phoneme – "jat diphthong" – or even two phonemes, one short and one long. There are even several proposals by Croatian linguists for an orthography reform concerning these two diphthongs, but they have not been seriously considered for implementation.

The ongoing standardisation of Montenegrin has introduced two new letters, and , for the sounds and respectively. These are optional spellings of the digraphs and . Critics argue that and are merely allophones of and in Herzegovinian dialects such as Montenegrin, and therefore the new letters are not required for an adequate orthography.

Most dialects of Serbia originally lack the phoneme , instead having , , or nothing (silence). was introduced with language unification, and the Serbian standard allows for some doublet