Bosanski, босански (also referred to as Bosniak)
Native Speakers: 2.7 million
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sandžak, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Kosovo
Official: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro (Co-Official)
Indo-European, Slavic
Features a highly inflected grammatical system, with seven cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, as well as three genders and two numbers (singular and plural). Verbs are conjugated based on tense, mood, aspect, person, and number, with a clear distinction between perfective and imperfective aspects. The language is largely phonetic, with pronunciation closely matching spelling, and follows relatively consistent grammatical rules. Bosnian vocabulary also reflects a rich cultural history, incorporating loanwords from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, especially in everyday expressions and traditional contexts.
The Bosnian language is primarily based on the Shtokavian dialect, specifically its Eastern Herzegovinian variant, which it shares with Croatian and Serbian. Within Bosnia and Herzegovina, regional speech can vary slightly in pronunciation, vocabulary, and intonation, but these differences are generally minor and do not hinder mutual intelligibility. The use of certain lexical choices and expressions—particularly those influenced by Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian—can be more prominent in Bosnian than in neighboring standards. Overall, while dialectal variation exists, standard Bosnian is uniform and widely understood across the country.
Cyrillic and Latin scripts
In the United States, the Bosnian language is primarily spoken within immigrant communities, especially among those who arrived during and after the Bosnian War in the 1990s. Significant Bosnian-speaking populations are found in cities such as St. Louis, Missouri—home to one of the largest Bosnian communities outside of Europe—as well as Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Jacksonville. Bosnian is often maintained as a home and community language, with some heritage speakers using it in religious services, cultural centers, and ethnic media. While many Bosnian Americans are bilingual in English, language access services remain important for older adults and recent arrivals.
At Latitude Prime, we offer Bosnian translation, Bosnian interpretation, and Bosnian localization services in numerous specialized subject areas and multiple dialects. Whether you need to translate legal documents into Bosnian, need a Bosnian interpreter for a business meeting in Sarajevo, or want to localize your website into Bosnian to market your products or services in the Balkans, Latitude Prime has the customized language solution to meet all of your Bosnian language needs.
