Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian: which should you learn?

Learn the one spoken by the people you want to talk to, and do not worry about the rest. Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, together with Montenegrin, are so close that their speakers understand each other without effort, and a learner of any one of them is understood across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. Linguists describe them as standard varieties of one pluricentric language; each is also the official language of its own country or people, and the names matter to the people who speak them.

How different are they?

Roughly as different as British and American English, sometimes a little more. The grammar is the same: seven cases, three genders and the same verb system. The differences are in some vocabulary, some spellings and the alphabet. A few everyday examples, in the order Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian:

• coffee: kahva, kava, kafa
• bread: hljeb, kruh, hleb (in Serbia)
• train: voz, vlak, voz
• history: historija, povijest, istorija
• January: januar, siječanj, januar
• week: sedmica, tjedan, nedelja or sedmica

Ijekavian and ekavian

One sound from old Slavic is pronounced in two ways. In Bosnian and Croatian it is usually ije or je: mlijeko (milk), rijeka (river), dijete (child). In Serbian as spoken in Serbia it is e: mleko, reka, dete. Serbian speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro use the ije forms too. Either way, everyone understands both.

Latin or Cyrillic?

Croatian is written only in the Latin alphabet. Serbian uses Cyrillic as its official script, and Latin is everywhere in daily life. In Bosnia and Herzegovina both alphabets are official, and Bosnian is written mostly in Latin. Learners of Bosnian start with the Latin alphabet, which is phonetic: every letter has one sound. Cyrillic follows the same one-letter, one-sound rule and takes most learners a few days to read.

Which should you choose?

• If your partner or family is from Bosnia and Herzegovina, learn Bosnian.
• If you are moving to Croatia, or your family is Croatian, learn Croatian.
• If your family is from Serbia, learn Serbian, and add Cyrillic early.
• If you are not sure, start with any of them. The grammar is the same, the core vocabulary is the same, and switching later costs only a list of words.

What Triglot teaches

Lessons at Triglot Languages teach standard Bosnian from A1 to C2. Amila is a native speaker of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian and points out the Croatian or Serbian word whenever it matters to you, for example when your partner's family is from Zagreb or Belgrade. A fifty-minute one-to-one Bosnian lesson costs £30, and the free level test shows where you are starting from.