As I understand it, the Serbian language is pretty unusual in that there are two parallel methods of writing it, using either Cyrillic or Latin letters. Have we got any Serbians on the SDMB that can explain exactly how that works in practice?
In other words, is it simply that some people always write in Cyrillic and some in Latin, or do they switch alphabets for different purposes? I assume pretty muich everyone can read both alphabets.
I have travelled quite a bit in former Yugoslavia but never in Serbia itself - I know Slovenia and Croatia use Latin script exclusively, and when I went to Montenegro in 2007 that also (surprisingly to me at the time) was pretty much Latin-only, although there was still the occasional old shop sign etc in Cyrillic.
A coupe of weeks ago I was in Bosnia, and road signs, station nameplates etc were often … I was going to say bilingual, but I guess “digraphic” is more accurate, but every business in Sarajevo seemed to use Latin exclusively.
On the road down towards Croatian border, in southern Bosnia, I noticed that many of the Cyrillic versions of town names had been (unofficially) spraypainted out, leaving only the Latin version, so I assume there’s a nationalist significance to this, which is unsurprising in Bosnia I suppose! (Cyrillic = Serb)
But in Serbia itself, is there a political significance to which script you choose to use?
Bonus question - back when Yugoslavia was Yugoslavia, was Cyrillic imposed on Croatia, Slovenia etc, in the same way it was in the Soviet Union?
(I know the best place to find this kind of stuff out would have been while I was actually in the region, but I thought it might be a touchy subject to bring up with the locals!)
I don’t believe it was. I have a Berlitz Serbo-Croatian phrasebook from the 1980s, and it merely explained the geographic breakdown of Roman/Cyrillic alphabets throughout the country. All the S-C phrases were given in the Roman alphabet.
I have a lot of anecdotes about this issue, because it interests me too, but I’m not Serbian, so I can’t be definitive.
From what I can tell, which alphabet you use is pretty politicized. I did once ask a guy in Bosnia why Bosnian is written in Latin letters and he told me that “Bosnia is a Central European country! We are in the heart of Europe! We are not Eastern Europeans!”
There does seem to be a feeling that using Latin letters is more “modern” and “European”. So people who would like to join the EU are more likely to use Latin letters and people who prefer to be aligned with Russia are more likely to use Cyrillic. Montenegro has taken a very pro-Europe stance, so Serbian as used there is generally written in Latin letters. However, I worked with a bunch of Montenegrin teenagers a few years ago at a summer camp and when we were all signing our little camp “yearbooks”, several of them signed their names in Cyrillic. When I asked one of them about that, she shrugged and said she likes Cyrillic better.
People use Latin letters in Sarajevo because Sarajevo is 90% Bosnian.
Personally, I wish all of the Slavic languages used Cyrillic. Cyrillic was designed for Slavic languages and they fit together nicely.
I can’t answer the OP, but I remember reading that in 20th century Azerbaijan people used the arabic alphabet, then switched to a latin alphabet, then to a cyrillic alphabet, and as far as I know, are now back to a latin alphabet. All this for the same language.
Which leads me to one of my favorite rules of thumbs… follow the religion. Serbs are Eastern Orthodox and Croats are Catholics. Orthodox generally corresponds to some form of Cyrillic and Catholics/Protestant to Latin script.
The religious may have become political, but religion was the original reason for the use of different scripts.
Right. Serbs, Croats and Bosnians speak the same language. It’s just that Serbs are Orthodox, Croats are Catholic, and Bosnians are Muslim. Even though nobody actually goes to church, kind of like in Northern Ireland.
Right, the Serb beats up on everyone for not going to the Orthodox church he skipped on Sunday due to a hangover, the Croat beats up on everyone for not going to the Catholic church he skipped because that’s the only day his wife lets him go fishing, the Bosnian beats up on everyone for skipping the Mosque he missed Friday because he overslept, but when they are all feeling brotherly, they go beat up on the Jew who missed Synagogue on Saturday for reasons no one bothered to ask.
Oh, no. They speak very different languages. Serbs speak Serbian, Croats speak Croatian, and Bosniaks speak Bosnian. The three languages just have identical grammars and vocabulary.
That’s likely not unique. In a sense, I’m an atheist Catholic (although it’s not really important where I live).
According to a Serbian lady I met at a conference, the standard dialects of Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian have started diverging from each other since the end of Yugoslavia, largely for political reasons.
As well, there are non-standard dialects of these languages that don’t have any direct analogue in the other languages. (By this I mean: there are, for example, Croatians who speak a language that is recognizably Croatian, but different from Standard Croatian, and different from all dialects of Serbian and Bosnian.)
Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian are apparently recognizably different. I once asked some Serbian kids I was working with if they could understand Bosnian, and they said yes, but [at this point they started giggling], they have such funny accents!
The thing about the South Slavic languages is that it’s really really hard to pin down where one language stops and another language begins, and these lines don’t match up with national borders, no matter what politicians like to think. I’ve traveled around the Balkans quite a bit and it feels to me that it’s more like a continuum. The farther west I go, the harder it is for me to understand people. This is how you get people speaking non-standard Croatian that’s still recognizably Croatian, etc. I’ve sometimes joked about how I speak “South Slavic”, because while I don’t speak Bosnian or Serbian, I have relatively little trouble speaking and being understood by people speaking those languages.
When I first lived in Bulgaria, I lived with a host family in the very far west of the country, close to the Macedonian border. I had a total crash course in Bulgarian and didn’t really learn enough to notice the local accent. Then I was shipped off to my permanent site, in the center of the country. When I went back to visit my host family, my Bulgarian much improved, I realized that everyone there spoke with a strong accent that I later discovered was, essentially, Macedonian.
Macedonian and Bulgarian are so similar that it’s debatable whether or not they’re separate languages. (Macedonians say yes, Bulgarians say no.) I’ve been to Macedonia three times, twice to Skopje, which is on the eastern part of the country (ie, closer to Bulgaria), and where I could understand people easily, and once to Ohrid, on the eastern border. I was shocked by how much trouble I had communicating there. Macedonia is a pretty tiny country, but even in that amount of space, there was a noticeable difference in accents. The eastern part of the country turns out to be where Macedonian begins to slide into Serbian. (Although my skillz were still good enough that I got charged the locals’ fee into all of the museums in Ohrid, even though I was obviously a foreigner. I guess they figure if you can speak the language, you must be some kind of a local. I don’t know.)
The only real linguistic cut-off in the South Slavic languages that I’m aware of is that Macedonian/Bulgarian doesn’t have cases, while Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian does. Well, and Slovenian is apparently quite different, but I don’t know much about it.
People in the Balkans don’t think this is particularly strange, and, in fact, think that the idea of widespread languages with multiple accents and dialects is what’s weird. There are loads of different versions of English far more different from each other than Macedonian and Bulgarian or Bosnian and Croatian. People in the Balkans find it weird that we nevertheless label all of these dialects and accents English. If I had a lev for ever time someone asked me how I could be an English teacher when wasn’t I American and therefore didn’t I speak American…well, I would have had enough to buy myself an ice cream. (When I explained that there’s no such thing as “American language”, and that Americans speak English, the questioner would inevitably say “but there’s a difference, right?” and sometimes get downright belligerent about it. Naturally none of these people spoke English, so it was kind of ridiculous to be challenged about it.)
That’s a very interesting post, Kyla. From what I hear, South Slavic languages are indeed a continuum, with Bulgarian and Slovenian being mutually unintelligible, but sliding from one to the other across a spectrum of pairwise intelligible dialects spoken all around the Balkans. But I’m a person whose knowledge of Slavic languages amounts to knowing a few words in Polish, so your experience is quite enlightening.
As someone who speaks fluent French and English, I can find people whose dialect I have trouble understanding, but they’re usually on the other side of the world. And I’ve learnt some Italian and Spanish, which (despite their similarity with French) are foreign languages, different enough to lose the mutual intelligibility. With the standardization of these languages, there is a definite break from one to the other. I’d find it interesting to take a road trip, and see the language slowly change as I visit village after village, reaching a point where communicating with the locals becomes difficult. I wonder if it’s the same with Danes, Norwegians and Swedes?
They are–the spelling, vocabulary, and grammar of these Serbo-Croat dialects are all a little bit different. It might be comparable to the difference between American and British English, say. I lived there for three months and I could pick up the difference between the Serbs and Croats living in our town. Tell-tale signs were words for certain items (bread is “kruh” in Croatian, “hleb” in Serbian), as well as standard Croatian tends to insert palatalizing "j"s before a lot of vowels in spelling and pronunciation (like “mlijeko” vs “mleko,” both words for milk). Also, Serbian allowed a question form that begins with the interrogative “da li,” which Croatian dialects didn’t use. Those are just some of the more obvious differences. At any rate, if I, a Serbo-Croat tyro could pick up on some of the differences, it’s probably crystal clear to people who live there.
Sweden has Skåne, which up until the late 17th century was a province of Denmark. (The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was actually born on what is now Swedish soil.) It is a bit of a running joke to poke fun at them because of their thick, nigh-unintelligible accent.
Wish I could remember where I’d found it, but Swedish Television had a series on this exact phenomenon, highlighting the differences in accent (and on occasion grammar) between the various regions in Sweden. The phenomenon is certainly there, although probably nowhere near to the same extent as what’s going on down ex-Yugoslavia way.
May I just add that in the beginning we all spoke the same language (with loads of regional peculiarities) but as the countries were formed with a central power the regional dialects started grouping together to form the present three major dialect groups, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish (I refuse to call them languages). The translations of the bible and the advent of book printing were also involved in this process.
I recall that the pronouns for “who” vary across the dialects in much the same way.
My understanding is that for historical as well as linguistic reasons, while the South Slav dialects do constitute something of a continuous spectrum, there are three major groupings accorded the status of ‘language’: Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. To understand this, we need to look at a 19th century map.
In the southeast, Bulgaria and its southern protectorate Eastern Rumelia joined to form the nation of Bulgaria with essentially the borders we see today. (It had access to the Aegean via a portion of coastal Thrace for a few years, and for two decades lost a wedge of northern Black Sea coast to Romania, but these may be disregarded – it’s had essentially the same borders for most of its independent existence.
Yugoslavia was assembled from the two independent nations of Serbia and Montenegro and possessions of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. This is where it gets complex.
a. Serbia’s boundaries between 1878 and 1918 included lands from the Sava River south to the Greek border. The southern part of its territory included the region called Macedonia (north of Greek-speaking Macedonia, the core of the historical realm of Philip and Alexander, and now termed FYROM, the “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, in international use in deference to Greek sensibilities). Macedonians speak a group of dialects that shade from Bulgarian into Serbian, which they themselves regard as an indemendent language but most linguists consider dialects of Bulgarian.
b. In the extreme northwest, the South Slav-speaking portions of the Austrian duchies of Carniola (most of it), Carinthia, and Styria (portions of each) were joined together as Slovenia; their dialects are sufficiently different from the language of Belgrade and Zagreb to warrant recognition as a separate language.
c. Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Croatia proper comprised a boomerang-shaped region united under the Ban of Croatia (title of a high nobleman) who was a vassal of the King of Hungary (who was also Emperor of Austria, but the two nations had discrete internal organizations). They were Catholics speaking Croatian dialects.
d. Montenegro was a separate kingdom united with Serbia at the end of World War One, whose speech, Montenegrin, was a Serbian dialect.
e. The Kosovo area of Serbia rather infamously included a mix of ethnic Albanians, speaking a very different language, with Serbs speaking Serbian dialects.
f. The Austro-Hungarian protectorate of Bosnia-Herzegovina included a mixture of Moslems, Catholics, and Orthodox speaking local Serbo-Croatian dialects in a rather crazy-quilt pattern. It belonged to neither Austria nor Hungary but to the combination, somewhat akin to the way U.S. territories belong to no single state but to the United States.
g. A portion of Hungary north of the Sava was given to Serbia after WWI. Callled the Banat or Vojvodina, its inhabitants were another melange of Magyar and Serbian speakers.
h. Finally, Serbia proper spoke Serbian dialects (except in Kosovo) and were predominantly Orthodox.
Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria historically wrote their language in a Cyrillic alphabet, the Austro-Hungarian lands in a Latin one.
The Yugoslav kingdom was dominated by Serbs and the Karageorgevich dynasty of Serbia were the monarchs. This was of course resented by the other nationalities.
Communist Yugoslavia structured itself as six Republics and two Autonomous Republics, similarly to the Soviet Union: Serbia (trading off Macedonia for the Vojvodina), Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia, with Serbia including Kosovo and the Vojvodina as autonomous areas. After the fall of European Communism, it broke up into its six constituent Republics, each of which regarded its local dialects as its official language. To some extent, Serbo-Croatian can be regarded as a creation of yugoslavia, an effort to keep the languages of five of the six republics centralized on one standard. To another extent, it is “real”, the recognition that the dialect clusters are mutually intelligible throughout them, though someone from Croatian Istria and someone from Skoplje are going to encounter the same issues as a Yorkshireman, a Mississippi redneck, and a Sydneysider trying to have a meaningful conversation.
This is interesting to me, because while I know there are differences, I haven’t been to either Serbia or Croatia (well, I’ve been in both of them, but it was just passing through) and don’t have a lot of personal experience with dealing with them. It’s clear just from your examples that Bulgarian is more similar to Serbian than to Croatian, which is just what you’d expect. One of the most obvious differences between Bulgarian and the western South Slavic languages is a flattening out of the “ya” sound. Like: the Bulgarian word for bread is “hlyab” (хляб), and in both Macedonian and Serbian, it’s “hleb”. The Bulgarian word for milk is “mlyako”(мляко), and in Macedonian and other Western S. Slavic languages, it’s “mleko”.
And I could easily imagine how you could use “da li” in a sentence, although “na li” sounds more natural to me.
A small, well-dressed man enters a Belfast pub late one night. Everyone glowers at him, and a huge bruiser soon gets up, walks over to him and asks threateningly, “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?”
“Why, neither,” the new guy says, sipping his beer. “I’m Jewish.”
The bruiser is a bit taken aback at first, but then he snarls, “Are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?”
