Comparison of standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian

Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are different national variants and official registers of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language.

Serbian, Montenegrin and Bosnian standards varieties tend to be inclusive, i.e. to accept a wider range of idioms and to use loanwords (German, Italian and Turkish), whereas the Croatian language policy is more purist[17] and prefers neologisms[18] to loan-words, as well as the re-use of neglected older words.

In 2017, numerous prominent writers, scientists, journalists, activists and other public figures from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia signed the Declaration on the Common Language, faced with "the negative social, cultural and economic consequences of political manipulations of language in the current language policies of the four countries",[20] which "include using language as an argument justifying the segregation of schoolchildren in some multiethnic environments, unnecessary 'translation' in administration or the media, inventing differences where they do not exist, bureaucratic coercion, as well as censorship (and necessarily also self-censorship), where linguistic expression is imposed as a criterion of ethnonational affiliation and a means of affirming political loyalty".

Critics argue that [ɕ] and [ʑ] are merely allophones of /sj/ and /zj/ in Herzegovinian dialects such as Montenegrin, and therefore the new letters are not required for an adequate orthography.

Also, when the subject of the future tense is omitted, producing a reversal of the infinitive and auxiliary "ću", only the final "i" of the infinitive is orthographically elided in Croatian and Bosnian, whereas in Serbian and Montenegrin the two have merged into a single word: In general, the Shtokavian dialects that represent the foundation of the four standard varieties have four pitch accents on stressed syllables: falling tone on a short vowel, written e.g. ⟨ı̏⟩ in dictionaries; rising tone on a short vowel, written e.g. ⟨ì⟩; falling tone on a long vowel, written e.g. ⟨î⟩; and rising tone on a long vowel, written e.g. ⟨í⟩.

In addition, a distinct characteristics of some vernaculars is stress shift to proclitics, e.g. phrase u Bosni (in Bosnia) will be pronounced /ǔ bosni/ instead of /u bôsni/ as in northern parts of Serbia.

The northern vernaculars in Serbia also preserve the four-accent system, but the unstressed lengths have been shortened or disappeared in some positions.

Stress shift to enclitics is, however, in northern Serbia rare and mostly limited to negative verb constructs (ne znam = I don't know > /nê znaːm/).

kočić There are three principal "pronunciations" (izgovori/изговори) of the Shtokavian dialect that differ in their reflexes of the Proto-Slavic vowel jat.

Ikavian pronunciation is nonstandard, and is limited to dialectal use in Dalmatia, Lika, Istria, central Bosnia (area between Vrbas and Bosna), Western Herzegovina, Bosanska Krajina, Slavonia and northern Bačka (Vojvodina).

So, for example: A few Croatian linguists have tried to explain the following differences in morphological structure for some words, with the introduction of a new vowel, "jat diphthong".

In Serbian, Montenegrin and some Croatian dialects (including some of those in Slavonia), it has been replaced with /j/, /v/, or elided, and subsequent standardisation sanctioned those forms: However, /x/ and /f/ have been kept in many words as a distinct feature of Bosnian speech and language tradition, particularly under influence of Turkish and Arabic, and even introduced in some places where it etymologically did not exist.

German organisieren, konstruieren, analysieren) Historically, modern-age internationalisms entered Bosnian and Croatian mostly through German and Italian, Montenegrin mostly through Italian, whereas they entered Serbian through French and Russian, so different localisation patterns were established based on those languages.

In some native names, Croatian has -ik where Serbian and Montenegrin have -(o)nik (kisik–kiseonik "oxygen", vodik–vodonik "hydrogen"), and Bosnian accepts all variants.

In Croatian, the pronoun who has the form tko, whereas in Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin it has ko, but again, in colloquial speech, the initial "t" is usually omitted.

Here is an example of a yat reflection that is the same in everything but the syntax: The sentence "I want to do that" could be translated with any of This difference partly extends to the future tense, which in Serbo-Croatian is formed in a similar manner to English, using (elided) present of verb "ht(j)eti" → "hoću"/"hoćeš"/… > "ću"/"ćeš"/… as auxiliary verb.

Here, the infinitive is formally required in both variants: However, when da+present is used instead, it can additionally express the subject's will or intention to perform the action: This form is more frequently used in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia.

Overuse of da+present is regarded as Germanism in Serbian linguistic circles, and it can occasionally lead to awkward sentences.

(A similar situation exists in French, where a question can be formed either by inversion or using est-ce que, and can be stretched in English with modal verbs): In addition, non-standard je li ("Is it?

In standard language, it is used only in questions involving auxiliary verb je (="is"): In summary, the English sentence "I want to know whether I'll start working" would typically read: although many in-between combinations could be met in vernacular speech, depending on speaker's dialect, idiolect, or even mood.

In most cases, common usage favours one variant and the other(s) are regarded as "imported", archaic, dialectal, or simply more rarely used.