# Forum Other Languages Slavic languages Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian  I want to learn!

## TATY

I want to learn Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian. But I don't know how different they are? Are they threee lanuages, or dialects of one? I understand Serbian uses Cyrillic, whereas Bosnian and Croatian use the Latin alphabet. 
Can you point me to decent onlien resources for starting out in the language(s). Is it best to learn all 3 together?

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## Tambakis

Three completely different languages. Serbian and Croatian are the most similar. Bosnian however has some Turkish influence I think. It'd be best to choose one and stick with it. learning all three would only confuse you. They're different languages, but similar enough to have you speaking a crazy mix of the three.  
 I'm not sure of many online resources. I do know of a few forums, although they're overrun with Croats attacking Serbs, Serbs attacking Bosnians, Albanians attacking Serbs, Bosnians attacking Croats. It's not a very friendly environment, and you can't really learn a whole lot. 
As far as I know Serbian and Croatian both use the latin and cyrillic alphabet. Cyrillic is more common in Serbian however. Road signs for instance, will many times be in both.

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## TATY

Thanks. I'll have a look. I think i'll larn Srpski

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## Tambakis

Excellent choice.

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## Stjepan

Croatian and Bosnian use strictly the Latin alphabet.  Serbian uses a modified Cyrillic alphabet, but you can get by with the latin alphabet in Serbia easily too.  However, if you choose Serbian, you should learn cyrillic. 
It's probably best to find a university course or a book in one of the three.  Croatian and Serbian are probably the most readily found and there is not a lot of resources for these languages beyond basic phrases on the internet to my knowledge.  If you do find some, it is ok to use resources from each of the three for understanding grammar.  The only big differences are in vocabulary,  and in some cases spelling and pronunciation.

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> As far as I know Serbian and Croatian both use the latin and cyrillic alphabet. Cyrillic is more common in Serbian however. Road signs for instance, will many times be in both.

 I don't think you can find any road signs in cyrillic travelling in Croatia, but in Serbia they use a lot the latin alphabet, by the way i guess many croatian can easily read cyrillic, exspecially if they are over 30 years old!

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## gianni

Sorry i forget to log in, the message before was mine!

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## Tambakis

Yeah I know. I didn't say only serbia, or say road signs in croatia are all latin because I would probably get attacked for that. For all I know there might be a tiny liitle town right on the border in Croatia that still has cyrillic road signs.   ::

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## Tambakis

Just found this, it looks promising.   http://www.serbianschool.com

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## Antono

Добар дан! 
Here is a good grammar overview: http://seelrc.org:8080/grammar/pdf/stand_alone_bcs.pdf .  ::  
До виђења!

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please stop being a thick fu:ck and buy a book, thanks  ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::   ::

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What a load of utter bleedin rubbish... "Three completely different languages"... "Serbian and Croatian both use the latin and cyrillic alphabet"... Tambakis, you haven't got a fookin clue of what the bloody hell you are talking about.

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## Stjepan

> I don't think you can find any road signs in cyrillic travelling in Croatia

 Some municipalities in Slavonia have street signs in both latin and cyrillic and you can find cyrillic signs on quite a few shops in the area.

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## Анатолий

> Three completely different languages. ..

 I wouldn't call them "completely" different. Not long ago they were considered one language: Serbo-Croatian, which was the official language in Serbia, Montenegro (Crna Gora), Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The first 2 used predominantly cyrillics, the second 2 - Latin. Any regional differences were considered part of the same language or dialects. Both Cyrillics and Latin were taught everywhere. 
Macedonia and Slovenia have "completely" different Slavic languages. 
After the war and the break-up of Yugoslavia they started to look for differences, so now there are "new" languages and all the differences are emphasized and old words are reintroduced to make languages even more different. 
Non-Slavic ethnic groups in Serbia:
Kosovo is populated with Albanians, Vojvodina with Hungarians and some Romanians.

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## Vlacko

Saying that Serbian and Croatian are two different languages is quite stupid... That would be like saying that Russian and Ukrainian belong to the Romanic group of languages............  ::  
They are very close related, mutually intelligable languages, and anyone who says that its different or doesn't know well, or speaks nonsense!
Political situation developed this "break up" of languages. Same political situation developed appearing so called "Bosnian" language, which is Serbian or Croatian language, just used by muslim population in Bosnia.
Tragically but politics has a great role in defining South Slavic languages.  ::

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## iblix

Yep... I just returned from Serbia and Bosnia, and everyone i met over there, though using the words "serbian" or "bosnian" to name their language, agreed it was one and the same language, with only some pronounciation and vocabulary differences...

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## Remyisme

Guys, of course this languages are not too different, all the Slavic languages come from one root, that's why they are so similar!

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## iblix

Being "not too different" because they have the same slavic roots is not the same as being actually one and the same language with just some regional differences... 
I'm a french speaking belgian.
Though French has the same roots as Italian, so that italian sounds very familiar to me, i cannot have a conversation with someone speaking italian.
Whereas I can speak with someone from France even tough we have a different accent and sometimes use different words or expressions. 
I guess that's the way it is between croatian, serbian, bosnian...

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## Remyisme

> Being "not too different" because they have the same slavic roots is not the same as being actually one and the same language with just some regional differences... 
> I'm a french speaking belgian.
> Though French has the same roots as Italian, so that italian sounds very familiar to me, i cannot have a conversation with someone speaking italian.
> Whereas I can speak with someone from France even tough we have a different accent and sometimes use different words or expressions. 
> I guess that's the way it is between croatian, serbian, bosnian...

 I know, you're right, i have the same thing, Russian is my native language, but even Ukrainian, just because it's so close to Russian, I can say I don't understand it, so I can't talk with someone who speak Ukrainian to me, not to talk of Serbian.

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Greetings to everyone.
I'm a Croatian-Russian teenager, and would like to say few words about my primary mother tongue.
First, about the differences. Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian are NOT the same language, to start with. Somebody mentioned they separated because of political reasons, but friends, keep in mind that they formally united for politic reasons as well. 
However, they are INTELLIGIBLE to that level that you are free to say that you understand all 3 by knowing only 1. But, friends, let us not deceive ourselves. It is dead easy for me to read Serbian and Bosnian (though I come across some Turkish influence in Bosnian), I read it like Croatian, but a foreigner who studies one of them perhaps would not say the same because there would be a lot of things he wouldn't understand, especially if he only began studying the language. I used to correspond with one Russian pal who would often get confused if I'd correct his mistakes in Croatian (he studied Serbian). There ARE differences in vocabulary, even in some grammar aspects. Trivial example:
Serbian - Hoću da vidim, i.e. hoću + appropriate person
Croatian - Hoću vidjeti, i.e. hoću + infinitiv
However, vocabulary differences are greater than these meticulous grammar and syntax things. 
Secondly, about the alphabet. In Croatia cyrillic is NOT used on regular level. In Eastern Croatia perhaps in some areas with major Serbian people. But no way for something official. Number of Croats knowing cyrillis is a big one, however, though I don't come across a lot of my age people who know it.
In Bosnia I think they use both. I've been recently in Republika Srpska, one part of Bosnia, and saw many signs in both.
I don't know how in Serbia, but I think cyrillic dominates. 
In short terms, learn one language and both alphabets and you can get by everywhere in that area, though I strongly advise you not to speak Serbian in certain parts of Croatia and vice-versa, or to claim that they are the same language in some parts, especially in Croatia, because if you come across specific people shit can happen, especially if you're a foreigner who, according to some of nationalistically-orientated, has no rights to say so. They will consider this a provocation.

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## petite fleur

croatian girl, i like your post about differences 
but i would not agree completely that people in croatia would get offended if foreigner uses incorect language..

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## iblix

> Somebody mentioned they separated because of political reasons, but friends, keep in mind that they formally united for politic reasons as well.

 I think you have an interesting point here. Politics can do and undo things that way. I guess even linguists don't agree on an exact definition of a language. So it's always the official ideas that will have the last word. Indeed, nowadays the langages are called different, and i guess tend to evolve more and more that way, whereas maybe beforehand the differences that existed were denied by the decisionmakers... 
When I think again about the example I gave about the french spoken in France and in Belgium, it's interesting to see that many belgian words or grammatical differencies are simply called mistakes.
I guess in another political context, Belgian-french could be considered as an official language, and those mistakes would actually be the rule. 
There is no simple truth in those matters.

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## TATY

In my univeristy in London, you can do a degree in Serbian and Croatian, but the language is treated as a single language. 
E.g. I do Russian, in my second year I got offered the choice to learn a second language, and one of the choices was "Serbian and Croatian" (a a single second language). 
My friend is learning Serbian and Croatian. He says that the only difference is the alphabets, and every so often he lears a word which is different in both languages. 
The same sort of thing exists in Romania and Moldova. In Moldova the official language is Moldovan. Moldovan however is just a dialect of Romanian. Not a separate language.  
I accidently bought a Serbian newspaper the other day (I was buying Russian newspapers, and didn't look properly, just saw the Cyrillic and picked it up). Anyway, loads of the adverts in it were written in Latin. 
But my point is. One of the biggest difference between Serbian and Croatian is that one uses Cyrillic, the other Latin. 
But if you compare a passage of Serbian in Latin, and the same passage in Croatian, how different are they? 99% the same, if not identical depending on the text.

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## iblix

I'm actually learning serbo-croatian, because the book I use was edited before that language stopped to exist.
In fact, it seems to be more Serbian ("lepo" and not "ljepo", grammatical habits also...) but some texts are Croatian, which means they make a difference. 
We all agree, i guess, that those languages are intelligible, and extremely close, and can actually be considered as one by many linguists.  
But we can't deny that they are not officially one and the same language anymore, and that it probably will accentuate their differences.
Languages are in constant evolution, that's why it's difficult for anyone to say something clear about all this.

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## Stjepan

> The same sort of thing exists in Romania and Moldova. In Moldova the official language is Moldovan. Moldovan however is just a dialect of Romanian. Not a separate language.

 It's not quite the same situation.  The Romanian language is a remarkably uniform one, and the Moldovan literary language is exactly the same as the Romanian.  It was simply given the name Moldovan for strictly political reasons. 
In the case of Serbian and Croatian, the language(s) are near totally mutually intelligible, but there is an important phonological difference between them and not just a few words that are different for whatever reason.  That is how their literary languages pronounce the old slavic vowel "jat", as iblix pointed out.  It's somewhat similar to how o's in Russian words become i's in corresponding Ukrainian words.  For example, Croatian words lijepo, mlijeko, prijevoz, ljeto, dijete, htjeti letjeti etc as opposed to Serbian lepo, mleko, prevoz, leto, dete, leteti, hteti etc.  There are many more examples and this, along with the Serbian "da" infinitive constructs, are the easiest way to tell if something is written in Croatian or Serbian although these differences in the words are not any kind of big problem in understanding. 
This is only really holds true when talking about the literary languages though.  When talking about spoken language, things are much more complicated.  Ekavski forms (lepo, dete, mleko etc) are used almost exclusively by  Serbian speakers, but some Serbs, like those in Bosnia and Montenegro, also use Ijekavski (lijepo, dijete, mlijeko) words.  A Serbian friend of mine originally from Sarajevo, for example, speaks a mixture of ekavski and ijekavski words.  In Croatia, the spoken language situation is more complicated because there are a number of Croatian-specific dialects that vary greatly with standard Croatian in vocabulary, pronunciation, and even grammar (kajkavski future tense is very different from the other Croatian dialects).  For example, the dialect my family speaks is ikavski (lipo, dite, mliko..) with a lot of italian-derived words. 
So the best way to think about is that in terms of spoken language, there are a number of regional dialects that are associated with one nation or another. But there are also three standard literary languages which are national languages, but those three national literary languages are probably more similar between each other than some of the Croatian dialects are to standard Croatian.  The literary languages have recognizable differences from each other and differ much more than "99%", but those differences don't get much in the way of intelligibility.

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