BG-Yougoslav languages

Yugoslav Languages

Yugoslav Languages, the three official languages of Yugoslavia-Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian. The languages belong to the southern branch of the Slavic subgroup of Indo-European languages.

Serbo-Croatian is the most widely spoken of the languages used in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and present-day Yugoslavia. Except for some differing word pairs that are easily understood, Serbian and Croatian are in effect one language; the Eastern Orthodox Serbs write it in the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Roman Catholic Croats write it in Roman script. During the 16th century, a rich poetic literature in Croatian was developed around Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast. The Serbo-Croatian literary language, formed in the early 19th century on the basis of certain dialects spoken over most of Serbo-Croatian Yugoslavia, is close to the language of this early Dalmatian literature.

Slovenian is primarily spoken in Slovenia and in neighboring areas of Italy and Austria. This language began to differ from Serbo-Croatian between the 7th and 9th centuries. For several centuries thereafter the Slovenes lived under German and Italian domination and used Latin for church services. It was not until the Reformation, when the Scriptures were translated into Slovenian, that the language came into its own. Slovenian retains one archaic feature of Slavic, the dual number, and includes many German loanwords.

Macedonian is primarily spoken in Macedonia and in adjacent areas of Bulgaria and Greece. The youngest of the Slavic literary languages, it became official only in 1944. Like Bulgarian (the fourth South Slavic language), Macedonian is virtually devoid of declensions (See also Bulgarian Language). Also like Bulgarian but unlike other Slavic languages, Macedonian has a definite article, and this occurs after the noun (for example, zena, "woman"; zenata, "the woman"). A significant admixture of Turkish elements is found in Macedonian and in Serbo-Croatian as well.