Croatian and Serbian as Stand-Alone Languages?
Croatian is presumedly spoken by up to 7 million people, of whom slightly more than 4 million live in Croatia proper. There are other Croatian-speaking groups in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the Serbian Vojvodina and Croatian emigrants in Central Europe, North America, South America and Australia.
The close connection between the three Southern Slavic languages of Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian is well known. The speakers can communicate with one another without any problems. Before Pan-Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991, the languages were called Serbo-Croatian and regional variations classified as dialects. This is objected to at the present time for political reasons, primarily in Croatia and Bosnia.
The Serbo-Croatian evolved from the Slavic branch of the Indo-Germanic and is classified with the group of Southern Slavic languages. Its remnant, the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, belong to the same linguistical group: All three build upon the Stokavian dialect.
The vast majority of the basic and extended vocabulary is identical. The regions were subject to different cultural influences, however, which were not cancelled out by the 19th- and 20th-century efforts at unity. The Serbian and Bosnia are generally more open to foreign words from Western languages than the Croatian. It draws more heavily on written traditions antedating the 19th century for this purpose. Also, Croatian is strictly written in Latin script, whereas Serbian is written both with the Cyrillic and with the Latin alphabet - depending on the focus of the text.
Through an amendment to the basic law in 2006, the Cyrillic script has been enshrined in Serbia as the standard, so that this now serves as the chief characteristic for distinguishing between a Croatian and a Serbian text.
