Most people in Bosnia and Herzegovina identify themselves by their ethnic group instead of nationality, although outside the country and for the purposes of this profile, the term Bosnian is used. Between these peoples, social behaviour is very similar and much like that of other Europeans. The country’s officially recognized languages are Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian. These languages belong to the South Slavic branch of the Slavic language group, a branch that also includes Slovene, Macedonian and Bulgarian. The structures and vocabularies of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian are so similar that speakers of any of them can easily understand one another; consequently, outside of the Balkans, the three languages are usually referred to as one, called Serbo-Croat. For writing, Bosnians use both Cyrillic and Latin scripts on an equal basis, a practise that reflects the division of these languages elsewhere in the Balkans: Croatian is always written in the Latin script, whereas Serbian usually uses Cyrillic. Cyrillic is named after St. Cyril, an apostle to the South Slavs who lived in the 9th century and developed the earliest version of the script to express the language of the people. Modern Cyrillic was standardized about 150 years ago, mostly by the 19th century philologist Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, who reformed the alphabet so that each of its 30 letters corresponds to a unique sound; for example, the language has neither silent letters, such as the English "k," nor diphthongs like the English "ei." Consequently, Cyrillic is completely phonetic and very easy to read and write once one knows the spoken tongue.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s history of contact with other cultures has left its mark on language. Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian contain words from Arabic, Persian, Hungarian, English and other European languages. Some Bosnians are fluent in French or German, while Muslims may also know some Arabic. Regionally, people also speak dialect versions of the official languages.
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