World Language Map

Where is Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian spoken?

Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian (srpskohrvatski jezik) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and 7 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian is spoken

Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian is spoken in 11 countries: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and 7 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Serbia100%6,652,210
Croatia99%4,108,619
Bosnia and Herzegovina100%3,798,670
Slovenia61%1,279,713
Germany0.8%664,541
Montenegro100%599,849
Kosovo10%197,709
Canada0.4%166,818
Austria1.2%107,616
Hungary0.3%31,538
Romania0.1%21,778

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian.

How many people speak Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian?

Wikidata gives about 19 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2022). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Balto-Slavic
  4. Slavic
  5. South Slavic
  6. Western South Slavic
  7. Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian

Related languages

Other languages in the Western South Slavic group:

More about Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian

Codes: ISO 639-3 hbs, Glottolog sout1528. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian

Where is Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian spoken?

Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian is spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia and 7 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 100% of the population of Serbia, which is about 6,652,210 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian?

Wikidata gives about 19 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2022). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian in?

Glottolog places Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Balto-Slavic, Slavic, South Slavic and Western South Slavic.

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