This
language is spoken by approximately 16 million inhabitants of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Most speakers are Muslims
who live in or are refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croats, Montenegrins,
and Serbs. Serbo-Croatian constitutes, along with the Slovene
language, the western group of the South Slavic branch of the Slavic languages.
It has three main dialects (according to the pronounciation of the interrogative
pronoun): C'akavian, spoken primarily on the Adriatic islands and along
the coast; Kajkavian, spoken in northwest Croatia and forming a transition
to Slovene; and Štokavian, spoken
in the rest of the territory.
The modern literary language developed during the 19th century. The
most important event in its history was the 1850 "Vienna Agreement," a
compromise between Croatian and Serbian literary figures and intellectuals
that established the Štokavian dialect as the basis of a united literary
language. The literary language has two major varieties: western, or Croatian,
which is written in the Latin alphabet; and eastern, or Serbian, written
primarily in the Cyrillic alphabet. A third standard is developing in Sarajevo
and the rest of Bosnia. The differences between the varieties are almost
entirely in vocabulary, with a few differences in syntax. The varieties
have essentially identical sound systems. The literary language is notable
for its vowel system. The vowels i, e, a, o, u,
and r may be long or short (referring to the length of the
vowel's sound) and may have rising or falling intonation. Thus the written
word sela may have four different pronunciations and meanings,
depending upon whether the first vowel is long or short and whether it
has rising or falling intonation. This intonation system is unique among
Slavic languages and can be met in Lithuanian
or Latvian, the Baltic tongues.
Serbo-Croatian has preserved most of the cases from Common
Slavic (the parent language of all the Slavic languages): nominative,
genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and vocative. The locative
case from Common Slavic has merged with the dative. Verb forms consist
of a present tense, two future tenses, a past (perfect) tense, and a pluperfect
tense. The literary language, especially in the eastern variant, has preserved
two other past tenses from Common Slavic: imperfect and aorist.
