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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / A9 Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin 544 / 600

word Croatian Montenegrin

where gdje đe

nowhere nigdje niđe

girl djevojka đevojka

Recently the Montenegrin alphabet introduced two additional letters: ś and ź (there

are Cyrillic versions as well) for specific consonants heard in speech there – but they

are rarely used in real life.

It has been observed that Montenegrin public media have recently started to use

more Croatian forms than before.

Bosnian

Bosnian (or: Bosniak, there’s a dispute over name – there are disputes about almost

everything) uses only Latin script and Ijekavian. Two spelling differences (e.g.

Njujork and imaću) are used sometimes in Bosnian, but it seems that Croatian

versions occasionally prevail (New York, imat ću). Standard Bosnian sometimes

freely mixes Croatian and Serbian terms, so both tisuća and hiljada 1000 seem

acceptable.

Since Bosnian is a standard used by Bosniaks which are predominantly Muslim, there

are lot of oriental and Islamic terms. Sound h is always retained, even when not in

Croatian (one example is lahko easy vs Croatian lako; of course, lahko exists in

some dialects in Croatia too, but it’s not standard). There are some specific terms,

e.g. daidža uncle (Croatian ujak).

Bosnia-Herzegovina is today officially tri-lingual, as evidenced by this warning on a

box of cigarettes that displays three identical sentences (the first one is just in

Cyrillic; I have taken a photo of an actual box):

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