The Bosnian language at one time left the Serbo-Croatian language after Yugoslavia broke up into several independent republics. Bosnian is spoken today in Bosnia and Herzegovina, however, knowing it, you can safely travel to Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia without encountering a language barrier.
A bit of history
Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin languages are based on the same dialect, making all these languages almost identical. During the existence of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, there was no official division: there was one common Serbo-Croatian language.
Today, the Bosnian language does not have a single recognition. The fact is that there is a literary language of Bosnians, that is, ethnic Muslims, while Bosnians are actually Bosnians, Bosnian Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats.
Influence of the east
The Bosnian language is the language of part of the southern Slavs living in Bosnia and in a certain territory in Serbia (the so-called Novopazar Sandzak, on the Serbo-Montenegrin border). It is also one of the official languages in Kosovo.
Although Bosnian is similar to Serbian, Montenegrin and Croatian, it still has one distinct difference from all. Ever since the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, it was Bosnians, as Muslims, who adopted a lot of Turkishisms, as well as Persisms and Arabisms. Turkish borrowings are used in speech and Serbs, but much less often.
Islam came to the Bosnian territories along with the Turks, and local feudal lords, under the threat of depriving their property, converted to this religion. Thus, in the 16th century, Islam completely supplanted Christianity in the upper layers of the population, greatly influencing the vocabulary of the language.
Bosnian language features
As mentioned above, the state language of Bosnia and Herzegovina differs from its neighbors primarily in the large number of turcisms. It is customary to consider not only the original words of the Turkish language, which are found in Bosnian in its purest form, but also words that over time have adapted to the Slavic word formation, as Turisms.
You can take for example the word kapija, which in translation from the Bosnian language means "gate / gate". This is the Turkish word kapı, which translates as "gate". Or the Bosnian (and not only) word jastuk (pillow), which was formed from Turkish yastık (pillow).
Among other turcisms there are the following:
- Ahlak moral is good behavior.
- Čardak (ardak) - the top floor of the house. Interestingly, in the Serbian language, the word Čardak refers to a small storage for corn.
- Divaniti - talk.
- Džennet is a paradise.
- Džemat - company, circle of friends.
This is not a complete list of Turkish borrowings in Bosnian. However, this is not his only feature. In addition to the fact that Bosnian is very nonsense, inclusions from the Serbian language are gradually supplanted from it and replaced by Croatian, although some stable Serbian words remain, for example, niko (no one), and not Croatian nitko in the same meaning.
And the third feature of the Bosnian language is the use of the consonant phoneme h in some words:
- “suddenly appear” - in Serbian and Croatian languages such word sounds like banutu, and in Bosnian - bahnuti;
- the word “reflected” in Serbian / Croatian sounds like oriti se, while in Bosnian it sounds like horiti se;
- another example is the word hudovica (widow), which in Serbian Croatian sounds like udovica (without the phoneme "h");
- the word meki and mehki, which translates as "soft," as you can see, in the Bosnian version, the phoneme "h" is again used.
How to learn Bosnian
The language spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina is very multicultural. As mentioned earlier, it is a Slavic language with a large admixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic. However, people who have previously studied, for example, the Croatian language, will easily understand Bosnian.
Learning a Bosnian language is quite simple for a Russian-speaking person, because he looks like Russian. In addition, today there is a huge selection of applications and sites for learning foreign languages, even not very popular. It is necessary to enter in the line of the search engine "learn the Bosnian language", and it will give out a huge number of different sites, dictionaries, phrasebooks, methods of learning this language.