Linguistic Condition in Former SFRY

July 28th, 2011 |

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Serbia and Montenegro gained the official name of the state as of February 4, 2003, as a result of the process of restructuring the country formerly known as The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Serbia and Montenegro is the biggest descendant of the dissolved Socialistic Federative Republic of Yugoslavia and consists of two states: Serbia and Montenegro.
Within Serbia, there are two quasi-independent provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo. Kosovo was under the supervision of the United Nations since 1999. Language politics and turns of time, official status and names of various languages took an important part in the numerous ethnical unrests that broke out from 1990 till 1999 and it is yet a very sensitive problem in the whole territory of the peninsula. Quality translate into Italian
The official tongue of the Republic of Serbia is Serbian (with over 6 000 000 speakers in the territory of Serbia without Kosovo, or 88% of the population); the same judicial status is afforded to both the Cyrillic and the Roman spelling, although the former is preferred for Serbian state administration. Less spread languages, which are also in governmental disposal in the parts where they are spoken, are Hungarian (according to the 2002 census info of the Statistical Institute of the Republic of Serbia, approximated at 286 500 speakers), Bosnian (134 500 speakers), Romanian (82 000 speakers), Albanian (63 500 speakers), Slovakian (57 500 speakers), Valachian (55 000 speakers), Romanian (34 500 speakers), Croatian (27 500 natives), Bulgarian (16 500 speakers), and Macedonian (14 500 speakers). Local languages are used at all levels of education: in primary schools, gymnasiums, and at technical schools and universities. One linguistic effect of the political and ethnic vulnerabilities of the last decade of XX century is that the language that previously was officially named Serbo-Croat has received several new ethnically and politically based names. As a result, the titles Serbo-Croat, Bosnianare governmentally determined and refer to the same language with possible few variations. The language has a couple general dialects, Ekavian and Ijekavian.
But, in general, Ekavian is spread widely in Serbia (and parts of Croatia), and Ijekavian is spoken more in Montenegro (and also in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and parts of Croatia), these dialects do not coincide with the ethnically based titles.
The linguistic situation in Kosovo is less clear at present, because about 300 000 refugees from this region, predominantly Serbs, are still on the stage of returning to their places. This fact makes the numbers of speakers reported unpredictable. These days, by the Statistical Office of Kosovo, about 1 670 000, or 88% of the citizens of Kosovo, speak Albanian, and about 133 000, or 7%, are speakers of Serbian. The rest of the people (5%) speaks mostly Romanian, Bosnian, Greek. HQ-translate: translate into Greek
The title tongue of the Republic of Montenegro is Serbian, but there are recent developments to introduce the term Montenegrin, either parallel to or as a replacement to the name Serbian. Just as with Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, this term refers to the same language that used to be called Serbo-Croat, and is first of all a subject of governmental decisions and convictions.
The Cyrillic and the Roman spelling are officially in use. The 2003 census data from the StatOffice of the Republic of Montenegro demonstrate that about 401 500, or 60% of the inhabitants of Montenegro, declare themselves as speakers of Serbian, about 145 000 (22%) speak Montenegrin, nearly 49 500 (7%) speak Albanian, 29 000 (4%) are speakers of Bosnian, and approx. 3000 speak either Croatian or Romany.