The Bosnian language once left the Serbo-Croatian language after Yugoslavia broke up into several independent republics. Today, Bosnian is spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina, however, knowing it, you can safely travel around Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia, without encountering a language barrier.
A bit of history
Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin 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.
To date, the Bosnian language does not have a single recognition. The fact is that there is a literary language of Bosniaks, that is, ethnic Muslims, while Bosnians are Bosnians proper, and Bosnian Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats.
Influence of the East
Bosnian is the language of part of the South Slavs,living in Bosnia and in a certain area in Serbia (the so-called Novopazar Sandzhak, which is on the Serbian-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 obvious difference from all. Ever since the dominion of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, it was the Bosnians, as Muslims, who adopted into speech many Turkishisms, as well as Persianisms and Arabisms. Serbs also use Turkish borrowings, but much less frequently.
Islam came to the Bosnian territories along with the Turks, and local feudal lords, under the threat of deprivation of their property, converted to this religion. Thus, in the 16th century, Islam completely replaced Christianity in the upper strata of the population, greatly influencing the vocabulary of the language.
Features of the Bosnian language
As mentioned above, the state language of Bosnia and Herzegovina differs from its neighbors primarily by a large number of Turkish words. Turkishisms are considered to be not only the original words of the Turkish language, found in pure form in Bosnian, but also words that eventually adapted to the Slavic word formation.
You can take for example the word kapija, which in Bosnian 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 the Turkish yastık (pillow).
Among othersTurkishisms are as follows:
- Ahlak moral - good behavior.
- Čardak (chardak) - the top floor in the house. Interestingly, in Serbian, the word Čardak refers to a small storehouse for corn.
- Divaniti - talk.
- Džennet - heaven.
- Džemat - company, circle of friends.
This is not a complete list of Turkish borrowings in Bosnian. However, this is not its only feature. In addition to being heavily Turkishized, Bosnian is gradually being squeezed out of the Serbian language and replaced by Croatian ones, although some stable Serbian words remain, for example, niko (no one), and not the Croatian nitko in the same sense.
And the third feature of the Bosnian language is the use of the consonant phoneme h in some words:
- "to suddenly appear" - in Serbian and Croatian, such a word sounds like banutu, and in Bosnian - bahnuti;
- the word for "reflect" in Serbian/Croatian is oriti se, while in Bosnian it is horiti se;
- another example is the word hudovica (widow), which in Serbian Croatian sounds like udovica (without the "h" phoneme);
- The word meki and mehki, which translates as "soft", as you can see, the phoneme "h" is used again in the Bosnian variant.
How to learn Bosnian
The language spoken in Bosnia andHerzegovina, very multicultural. As mentioned earlier, it is a Slavic language with a large admixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic. However, people who have previously learned, for example, Croatian, will easily understand Bosnian.
It is quite easy for a Russian-speaking person to learn the Bosnian language, because it is similar to Russian. In addition, today there is a huge selection of applications and sites for learning foreign languages, even not very popular ones. It is worth entering "Learn the Bosnian language" into the search engine line, and it will give out a huge number of different sites, dictionaries, phrasebooks, methods for learning this language.
