# Forum Other Languages Slavic languages Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian  Russians and Bosnians

## Tutor

I recently came upon a Bosnian language page and found that the language is extremely similar to Russian (no wonder here since they are both of the same Slavic group). Still, they are different enough so that knowing Russian I would be able to understand only about 15% of Bosnian language. 
I got a bit interested in learning more about Bosnian culture and currently looking for the answers to some questions. Does anybody know any facts on how Bosnians (plus Croatians and Serbs) treat Russians? Do they have an eye on Russians like, say, older generations of Polish people do? Or are they generally friendly?

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## garmonistka

> I recently came upon a Bosnian language page and found that the language is extremely similar to Russian (no wonder here since they are both of the same Slavic group). Still, they are different enough so that knowing Russian I would be able to understand only about 15% of Bosnian language. 
> I got a bit interested in learning more about Bosnian culture and currently looking for the answers to some questions. Does anybody know any facts on how Bosnians (plus Croatians and Serbs) treat Russians? Do they have an eye on Russians like, say, older generations of Polish people do? Or are they generally friendly?

 The Serbs traditionally adore the Russians. The Kroats and the Bosniacs (Muslim Bosnians) wouldn't be too keen on the Russians I suppose, because of the historical link with the Serbs.

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## JJ

> ...I would be able to understand only about 15% of Bosnian language.

 Sometime I visit Serbians sites and I can understand from 10% up to 70-80% of serbian language it depends on style and subject.  ::    

> Or are they generally friendly?

 I don't know about Bosnians, I've never talked to Bosnians, but Serbs are always friendly and they are good guys.
BTW, I got a friend in my town, he is  my real friend, it looks like his forefathers from there, his last name is Serbin.  ::

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## garmonistka

> , but Serbs are always friendly and they are good guys.

 For all people from all nations: you have good guys and not so good guys everywhere, nationality has little to do with morality...

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## Dogboy182

There is a foriegn exchange student in my german class from croatia.  i have commented several times before how similar bosnian/serbian/croation is to russian. heres to examples 
Мне-Mne
Добрый день- Dobar dyen. 
She often brigns this german grammr book to class that is written in croation, and one time i asked her if i could read it out loud. she said i did a pretty good job, but i have a russian accent. i told her "that's the plan"   ::  . i don't really talk to her to much though, she is kinda stupid. but from what i have heard, croations, in general like russians. but for some reason croations seem to think they are the best slavik country  ::  .

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## Fantomaks

> but for some reason croations seem to think they are the best slavik country  .

 I suppose all slavic nations think that they have the best slavic country   ::   In any case Russia is bigger (and the best, of course  ::  )

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## MasterAdmin

> but for some reason croations seem to think they are the best slavik country  .
> 			
> 		  I suppose all slavic nations think that they have the best slavic country    In any case Russia is bigger (and the best, of course  )

 Looks like this Serbian proverb partially supports your point: 
Бог високо Русија далеко 
Translation: God is high above, Russia is far away.

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## Dogboy182

i don't get it.

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## Zeus

> i don't get it.

 That is, anyone who could help, either God or Russia  :: , is out of reach.  
As for Slavic languages... I remember when I was a child, I was a keen enthusiast of scale modelling. I had some ~40 plastic aeroplanes. They mostly came from East Germany. Each box had a tube of dichlorethane glue with a leaflet with instructions how to use it in most languages used in Eastern bloc, sorted in alphabetical order. The first was Albanian, then followed Bulgarian (but I didn't know that). Russian was on the other side, so Bulgarian part was the only one in Cyrillic on the front side. So I read: 
Лепило за пластмасси, огнеопаст... 
I bursted in laugh: oh those funny Germans, they don't know how to write in Russian! "Лепило", hehe  ::  But I haven't even thought it was not in Russian! Generally, everything was clear. Compare: 
Клей для пластмассы, огнеопасен. 
"Лепить", as a verb, exsists in Russian, too and means "to stick" or "to make shape". 
So what I wanted to say: it is always possible for a Russian to make out what the text is about, for nearly all Slavic languages. And, besides, most of them sound very funny for a Russian. 
About Bulgarian, I believe (though I don't know for sure) it's the simplest Slavic language. AFAIK it's the only living Slavic language which lost declensions. However, it has articles. Nevertheless, I would say Bulgarian is not much harder to read than Ukrainian, which is closer to Russian, and maybe easier than Belorussian.

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## MasterAdmin

> i don't get it.

 Or it could mean "Russia is fine, but it's good they are far away and don't bother us" :))

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## Pravit

@Zeus: Very funny story!   ::   
Bulgarian doesn't have declensions and it has articles????   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   That's....not right!   ::

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## MasterAdmin

In Bosnian, they have gender endings for plural nouns   ::   but they have less endings for cases.

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## al

> @Zeus: Very funny story!    
> Bulgarian doesn't have declensions and it has articles????         That's....not right!

 It's right  ::  (Not only for Bulgarian but also for Macedonian). And they don't have infinitive forms for verbs either. 
BTW, I know one Bulgarian, and he says that Serbian language sounds extremely funny to him  ::

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## Stefani

I do think Serbian language does sound funny. 
Like, in Croatia the word for white would be 'bijelo' but in Serbian it is 'belo'. I personally think this sounds funny (probably because i speak Croatian) but it sounds much stronger if you know what i mean. The language on a whole is stronger than Croatian, which is kind of gentle and just sounds nicer when spoken.   ::

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## al

Hey, Croatian and Serbian are the same language, or aren't they?

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## Jasper May

> Hey, Croatian and Serbian are the same language, or aren't they?

 I think you've made some enemies with this statement, al. ::

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## garmonistka

> Originally Posted by al  Hey, Croatian and Serbian are the same language, or aren't they?   I think you've made some enemies with this statement, al.

 Well linguistically speaking the languages are regarded as 1 language. However there are major efforts from the Croatian side to hurry up the linguistic divorce. This way new words are being coined. The strangest of which I thought was zrakoplov  for aeroplane!!

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## Stefani

Heya, yeah they are the same language, its just some words are different as in spoken differently. The language used to be defined as Serbo-Croatian but they are seperate now i think.   ::

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## Stefani

Zrakoplov is aeroplane, hehehe, why is that funny?!! Can someone tell me, i do not know due to my ignorance, but when i am in croatia, we call the airport 'aerodrom' which you would expect i guess, but in Zagreb the actual airport sign says 'Zracna Luka' (with an accent on the c making it a 'ch' sound)....When i ask relatives they never give me a straight answer!
 :P

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## Pravit

ZAGREB!!!!! I want to go there sometime. Just because the name sounds very exciting. Stefani, tell us, does Croatian have any cases or declensions?

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## Stefani

I do think Zagreb is brilliant   ::  
I am sorry but i do not know what you mean by cases or the other one (!), i was taught Croatian at a young age, my mother spoke to me in it, so i grew up bi-lingual, but if you asked me to write an essay in Croatian i wouldnt get very far. I can spell and write and everything but really i need to go to a Croatian school, or do what my father did in Zagreb. He learnt the language at a School of foreign languages in Zagreb, and he got money by doing Engish classes there.

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## al

> does Croatian have any cases or declensions?

 It has.

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## garmonistka

> Zrakoplov is aeroplane, hehehe, why is that funny?!! Can someone tell me, i do not know due to my ignorance, but when i am in croatia, we call the airport 'aerodrom' which you would expect i guess, but in Zagreb the actual airport sign says 'Zracna Luka' (with an accent on the c making it a 'ch' sound)....When i ask relatives they never give me a straight answer!
>  :P

 New words are being coined in Croatia in order to artificially broaden the gap between Serbian and Croatian.

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## MasterAdmin

OK, it's been a while since anybody responded on this topic. But don't think this topic is dead. I've just met two different people from former Yugoslavia and I'm getting an impression that Slavic people are very close together overall. I can only be sorry about the fatal circumstances in Bosnia in the early '90s.

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## garmonistka

> OK, it's been a while since anybody responded on this topic. But don't think this topic is dead. I've just met two different people from former Yugoslavia and I'm getting an impression that Slavic people are very close together overall. I can only be sorry about the fatal circumstances in Bosnia in the early '90s.

 Have you spoken to any Polish people about Russia lately ?  ::  )))

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## MasterAdmin

> Originally Posted by MasterAdmin  OK, it's been a while since anybody responded on this topic. But don't think this topic is dead. I've just met two different people from former Yugoslavia and I'm getting an impression that Slavic people are very close together overall. I can only be sorry about the fatal circumstances in Bosnia in the early '90s.   Have you spoken to any Polish people about Russia lately ?  )))

 Yeah, I know they hate Russians. But things are getting better with younger generations who don't have an eye on Russians because of the  former USSR policy.

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## Mayita

I am loving this post  ::  
I am Croatian-Bosnian, living in Malta and studying Russian (must be some record for complicative living) so I might be able to give a different perspective to what was initially asked. 
Bosnians are by nature really friendly, down to earth people, who instead of hating the world for their misfortunes prefer to laugh it off and use humour to keep going. they rarely look down on any cultures (although they'll joke about them hehe) 
Croats, and I'm not ashamed to admit this, think they rule, palin and simple, and while they love to travel (Croats only need visas for the UK and USA), meet different people etc, but they've got a strong sense of identity and usually take great pride in their nationality. 
I'm gonna be honest here. Croats aren't crazy about Russians at all, always look at them from the corner of their eye like someone else said and don't exactly place great trust in them.
However, I've met quite a few Russian tourists in Croatia who loved the place and never had any problems at all. 
Onto the language side. Croatian, like in Czech, has the 'vocative' case and the grammer is extremely complicated. In my opinion, Croatian would be much harder to learn than Russian (plus Russian is spoken slower and is more melodic) and I've never had problems understanding my Russian friends. They on the other hand, usually only understand about 30 % of Croatian, which gives me the opportunity to be quite evil at times  ::  
That's it from me  ::

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## ValleyForge

I'll agree that the newer Polish generations don't have a dislike for the Russians.  I'm of Polish descent and I spend just about all my time with my friend who is Russian (her dad works for a local company). 
I've never noticed any dislike between her family and my parents. 
On a different note, how similar are Russian and Polish.  My friend claims she can understand my father when he speaks Polish but he says that he can't understand a thing she says.

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## MasterAdmin

> I am loving this post  
> I am Croatian-Bosnian, living in Malta and studying Russian (must be some record for complicative living) so I might be able to give a different perspective to what was initially asked. 
> Bosnians are by nature really friendly, down to earth people, who instead of hating the world for their misfortunes prefer to laugh it off and use humour to keep going. they rarely look down on any cultures (although they'll joke about them hehe) 
> Croats, and I'm not ashamed to admit this, think they rule, palin and simple, and while they love to travel (Croats only need visas for the UK and USA), meet different people etc, but they've got a strong sense of identity and usually take great pride in their nationality. 
> .... 
> That's it from me

 Mayita, that's good to have an opinion from the first source  ::   Did you happen to meet _westernized_ or _americanized_ bosnians? How do they become different if at all?  
I know Russians become different when they move to live in the US, but I'd have to start a different thread to discuss it.   

> On a different note, how similar are Russian and Polish. My friend claims she can understand my father when he speaks Polish but he says that he can't understand a thing she says.

 I wouldn't understand any Polish just knowing Russian. I can only guess that Polish have more exposure to the Russian language than Russians do have with Polish. And that might be the reason Polish understand more Russian.   ::

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## Mihkkal

Whatever 'declensions' is, this grammatical term seems to be called something else in my language... because I've never heard of it. Can someone briefly explain what declensions are about?

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## Alware

The case system in Russian does two things. First, it marks the grammatical functions of nouns which are indicated by word order in English, that is, the subject, object and indirect object of the sentence. (This means that these nouns are free to be ordered almost anywhere in the sentence since their function is clearly indicated by their form.) Second, cases mark certain adverbial functions such as the time, manner, and means of carrying our an action, which are marked by prepositions in English, e.g. by hand, on Friday, with enthusiasm This function leads to the case system being associated with prepositions  http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/rus ... /case.html

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## Mayita

_Mayita, that's good to have an opinion from the first source   Did you happen to meet westernized or americanized bosnians? How do they become different if at all?  
I know Russians become different when they move to live in the US, but I'd have to start a different thread to discuss it._ 
**************************************  
I had to laugh at your first question, since there are thousands of Bosnian jokes which involve a typical Bosnian moving to America  :: 
Half of Bosnia must be in America by now. There's no other way to explain this because every Bosnian (including me) has family living there, as well as Germany. In my time (ok, I'm 19, but experience doesn't really have much to do with age in the Balkans) I've met all kinds of Bosnians.  
Many people I knew dreamt about living in America every night, only to hate the place and claim to be dying of nostalgia once they got there. Most Bosnian parents are quite protective of their kids, so that the running around till 5 am they used to do back home was now out of the question. 
The effects of war now have such a broad sociological aspect that it's impossible for me to explain in a few lines, but hey, I'll try  ::  
In my opinion, it all depends what age the people were when they left for the west. The adults, who were forced to leave, generally cannot wait to make a bunch of money, go back to Bosnia and build their house again, if it was destroyed (my family are doing this.) Other adults I know are waiting till they're eligible for pension, and then move back home. 
The kids who left generally look at their country of origin as the Promised Land and wait and wait to go back home. Bosnians and Croats are usually very nostalgic people (me being prime example #1) and not many leave the country and never return, though I also know people from this category. 
The only problem I have with emigration etc is when the children are not taught their language of origin. Usually Bosnian/Croatian parents teach their kids the language at an early age and it's usually a "scandal" if this doesn't happen to be the case. Funniest thing is that you also have kids born in say, America, who have never been to Bosnia, speaking English with a Bosnian accent. You have to love their sense of identity  ::  
And yes, one other thing I've realised is that many of them think they don't belong anywhere. In America, they're Bosnians, while in Bosnia, they are called Americans, but this is usually done to tease and annoy the poor kids  ::   
 What aelse can I say? We're a messed up nation, both in the countries and outside of them  ::

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## Ljosha

> ZAGREB!!!!! I want to go there sometime. Just because the name sounds very exciting. Stefani, tell us, does Croatian have any cases or declensions?

 I can tell that all three - Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian - have a full system of declension like in Russian and and most other Slavic languages. Their nouns and adjectives are changed by gender (masculine, feminine), number (singular, plural), and case (6 cases like in Russian, plus the 7th, vocative, case for nouns, primarily proper names). Some noun and adjective endings are the same as in Russian or Old Slavonic, others have been modified in pronunciation over centuries. 
Needless to say this declension system is the same between these three Yugoslav languages.

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## astarz41

I have a friend who is from Yugoslavia. She is awesome and her family is very friendly towards Russians. Her dad worked in both Moscow and St. Petersburg and now my friend wants to visit St. Pete because she thinks it is a very beautiful city! And yes, I can understand a number of words when she speaks Serbian. I agree that other slavic languages sound like a parody of Russian to me. But similarly, does Russian sound as a parody of Serbian to a Serb?   

> Yeah, I know they hate Russians. But things are getting better with younger generations who don't have an eye on Russians because of the former USSR policy.

 In return some Russians think Polish people have an inferiority complex because they always display their nationality publically (Polish flags on their cars etc)   ::

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## Dogboy182

If you watch behind enemy lines, i think they are speaking serbian... i could understand nearly everything they were sayign without looking at the subtitles...

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## Tambakis

If you watch No Man's Land, they speak Serbian alot as well.

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## Zhenya

Anyone else had high volume on that movie while they were talking and then almost got a heart-attack, when they fired off some artilleryfire!???
I looked like this for half an hour after    ::

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## Dogboy182

Unlike most americans, i do not have a high quality TV, or surround sound speakers, so i am not fortunate enough to be able to be scared liek you   ::   ::  . It sounds like a good idea though  
BTW if i had a system like that, i'd watchsaving private ryan 25 times a day.

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## svabo_sarajlija

Bosanci su dobro prema svima. Evo, ja sam došao iz Njemačke i poslije godinu dana nisam se ni htio vratiti tamo i napustiti Sarajevo. Moja raja je bila svih vjera i nacija: Bošnjaci, Srbi, Turci, Hrvati. 
For all who didn't understand: Bosnians are very nice to every kinds of strangers. I came from Germany for one year and at the end of that year I didn't want to leave Sarajevo. My friends were of all religions and nationalities: Bosnian muslims, Serbs, Turkish people and Croats. 
Come to Bosnia-Herzegovina and you will see!!!

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## Vlacko

> I have a friend who is from Yugoslavia. She is awesome and her family is very friendly towards Russians. Her dad worked in both Moscow and St. Petersburg and now my friend wants to visit St. Pete because she thinks it is a very beautiful city! And yes, I can understand a number of words when she speaks Serbian. I agree that other slavic languages sound like a parody of Russian to me. But similarly, does Russian sound as a parody of Serbian to a Serb?

 I must say that most of Serbian people feel the same for Russians...
That's probably because of the conection that existed, and still exist between our two nations.
Russians and Serbs are conected through religion, letter, culture, more then shall I say Croats, Poles.
I learn Russian in school, and I must say that Russian sometimes looks very funny to me. 
Many words are the same but have very different meaning, and that's the most funniest thing.

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## jujav4ik

> Many words are the same but have very different meaning, and that's the most funniest thing.

 In comparison with other Slavic languages, Russian was more influenced in taking foreign vocabulary (for example, turk, german, french etc), and after the changes of grammar and some styles by Derjavin and Pushkin in the 19th century, the difference between other Slavic languages became bigger then it was before. 
But mentioning Serbian-Croatian language...you can still hear popes using it in the churches  :: [/quote]

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## TATY

> Many words are the same but have very different meaning, and that's the most funniest thing.
> 			
> 		  In comparison with other Slavic languages, Russian was more influenced in taking foreign vocabulary (for example, turk, german, french etc), and after the changes of grammar and some styles by Derjavin and Pushkin in the 19th century, the difference between other Slavic languages became bigger then it was before. 
> But mentioning Serbian-Croatian language...you can still hear popes using it in the churches

 [/quote] 
Priests, not popes. In English pope only refers to THE Pope. Who is currently that Razinger man.

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