A friend asked me why Bosnians sometimes get offended when people claim we speak the same language as Serbs and Croats and are just a dialect of Serbo-Croatian. I’m no linguist so I had to do some bare minimum basic googling...

While yes, we can have coherent conversations with other Balkans in our own languages, history plays a big part in our distinctness. For one, our culture has been continuously overshadowed even on our own land but that’s a lot to dive into rn...

Second, Bosnian within itself is diverse and contains many different religional and cultural dialects. Over time, we’ve adopted a more unified language with our neighbors partly because of survival.

Bosnian language has always been unique and has gone through multiple writing and grammatical systems of its own in the region. Ancient Bosančica, for example, was a form of Cyrillic used to write Bosnian and was even adopted by some coastal parts of Croatia...

Eventually, Ottomans brought Arabic, Persian and Turkic languages and due to our acceptance of Islam, heavily influenced dialects in Bosnian in a way that didn’t reach other countries in the region...

Between the 15th-20th Centuries, Bosniaks used the Arebica (pronounces Arebitsa) writing system which utilized Arabic-Persian script with added characters for letters such as č, ž, etc. So until about 120 years ago or so we basically wrote our language in Arabic...

It was the Austro-Hungarians that ultimately shifted our language toward a more congruent spoken language as well as the adoption of the Serbian Cyrillic and Latin as primary writing script systems.

Bosniaks even petitioned to keep Arebica as a third official system in Bosnia but ultimately failed. Arebica was the only form of Arabic script considered to be a complete alphabet as it was based on letters rather than strictly sounds.

To this day, there are elements of Arabic, Persian and Turkish language that exist in Bosniak dialect distinct from verbiage used by Croats and Serbs. So short answer, history and colonialism.

Arebica and Bosančica

Outside of cultural influences, our languages also have three distinct linguistic rules for pronunciation, syntax, and spelling. Croats & Bosnians share the Latin writing script but Serbs still utilize Cyrillic.

Also like they keep trying to kill us so we just don’t wanna be associated like that just saying.

Language got realllyyyy messy post war in the 90s when the Dayton Peace Agreement gave Bosnia a 3-in-1 nationality situation thus prompting really petty linguistic rules to be added in order to establish an independent identity.

I’m talking PETTTYYYYY MINOR ASF differences. A comedy sketch show called Top Lista Nadrealista even did a skit about a Herzegovinian man trying to ask a Serbian woman on a date, each speaking their own dialects and unable to understand each other...

They eventually got a translator who translated by repeating the exact same phrase each of them stated. Smsmdmkkamajsjakkskkkkjjssjsjjzjzjjakskj

Listen. We may be petty but we ain’t having it.

Ah, politics.