Serbian vs Croatian vs Bosnian: one language or three?
How different Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin really are, where the differences lie, and which one to learn if you want to be understood everywhere.
The short answer
Linguistically, one language with four standard forms. A speaker from Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo and Podgorica understand each other completely, read each other's newspapers and watch each other's films without subtitles. The differences are real and people care about them, but they are of the order of British and American English, or the German of Germany and Austria: a different script here, a different word there, a handful of grammatical preferences, and a great deal of politics.
If you learn Serbian you will be understood in all four countries. The rest of this page is about what you will notice.
Where the name comes from
Until 1991 the language was officially called Serbo-Croatian and taught as one standard with two variants. When Yugoslavia broke up, each new state named its language after itself, wrote its own orthography and school grammar, and emphasised what set it apart. Linguists mostly still treat the four as standard varieties of one language, sometimes called BCMS for Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian. Nobody in the region calls it that in conversation; you say srpski, hrvatski, bosanski or crnogorski depending on where you are and who you are.
jezik
language; tongue
the same word for the language you speak and the organ in your mouth
Je li srpski težak jezik?Is Serbian a difficult language?
| case | singular | plural |
|---|---|---|
| nom | jezik | jezici |
| gen | jezika | jezika |
| dat | jeziku | jezicima |
| acc | jezik | jezike |
| voc | jeziče | jezici |
| ins | jezikom | jezicima |
| loc | jeziku | jezicima |
The differences you will actually meet
Script. Serbian uses both Cyrillic and Latin, and both are official; Cyrillic dominates in state use and Latin in daily life and online. Croatian is written only in Latin. Bosnian and Montenegrin use Latin almost exclusively. The two alphabets map letter for letter, so reading Cyrillic is a few days' work, not a new language.
Ovo je ćirilica, a ovo je latinica.
This is Cyrillic and this is the Latin alphabet.
The e/ije split. The old Slavic vowel yat became e in Serbia and ije or je in Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro. So it is mleko in Belgrade and mlijeko in Zagreb and Sarajevo, lepo and lijepo, reka and rijeka, dete and dijete. This is the single most audible difference, and it is regional rather than national: Serbs in Bosnia and Montenegro say mlijeko too. Learn the e forms, hear the ije forms, and you will convert in your head within a week.
Vocabulary. A few hundred everyday words differ, usually because Croatian prefers a Slavic coinage where Serbian keeps an international loan.
| Serbian | Croatian | English |
|---|---|---|
| hleb | kruh | bread |
| voz | vlak | train |
| hiljada | tisuća | thousand |
| fudbal | nogomet | football |
| univerzitet | sveučilište | university |
| kafa | kava | coffee |
| šta | što | what |
| januar, februar | siječanj, veljača | January, February |
| pozorište | kazalište | theatre |
| pasulj | grah | beans |
Bosnian sits between the two and keeps more Turkish words, often with an h the others dropped: kahva for coffee, lahko for easy. Montenegrin is closest to the Serbian of the south and adds two letters of its own that few people use.
A few grammatical habits. Serbian prefers da plus a present tense where Croatian prefers the infinitive: hoću da idem against hoću ići, I want to go. Both are correct everywhere; the preference is what marks you. Serbian writes the future as one word where the infinitive drops its -i, radiću, Croatian as two, radit ću. Croatian keeps the question word što and the pronoun tko where Serbian has šta and ko. The rest of the grammar, cases, aspect, tenses and all, is the same.
Pronunciation. Mostly identical. The accents of Zagreb, Sarajevo and Belgrade differ the way regional accents do anywhere, and a learner is in no danger of confusing them for years.
Which one to learn
Learn the one spoken where you will use it. If that is Serbia, learn Serbian; you will read both scripts, say mleko and hleb, and be understood in Split and Mostar without adjusting anything. If it is Croatia, learn Croatian, with the same result in reverse. If you have no reason to choose, Serbian has the larger population of speakers, the second script that opens Russian, Bulgarian and Macedonian signage, and the more relaxed attitude to the international vocabulary an English speaker already owns.
Whichever you pick, you are not choosing a language. You are choosing a spelling, a few hundred words and which vowel to say in milk. Everything hard about the language, the seven cases, the verb aspect, the clitics in second position, is the same in all four, and it is what your time should go on.
Read next
- Is Serbian hard to learn for an English speaker?
An honest look at what makes Serbian difficult for English speakers, what is easier than its reputation, and what to learn first.
- How long does it take to learn Serbian?
Realistic timelines for an English speaker, from a first conversation to fluency, in hours and in months at the pace you can actually keep.