Serbo-Croatian – called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro.
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Process of linguistic standardization of Serbo-Croatian was originally initiated in the mid-19th-century Vienna Literary Agreement by Croatian and Serbian writers and philologists, decades before a Yugoslav state was established.
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Serbo-Croatian is a pro-drop language with flexible word order, subject–verb–object being the default.
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Serbo-Croatian generally goes by the individual names Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and sometimes Montenegrin and Bunjevac.
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The term Serbo-Croatian was first used by Jacob Grimm in 1824, popularized by the Viennese philologist Jernej Kopitar in the following decades, and accepted by Croatian Zagreb grammarians in 1854 and 1859.
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Today, use of the term "Serbo-Croatian" is controversial due to the prejudice that nation and language must match.
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The common phrase describing this situation was that Serbo-Croatian or "Croatian or Serbian" was a single language.
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All variants of Serbo-Croatian were used in state administration and republican and federal institutions.
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However, legal equality could not dampen the prestige Serbo-Croatian had: since it was the language of three quarters of the population, it functioned as an unofficial lingua franca.
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Serbo-Croatian is a second language of many Slovenians and Macedonians, especially those born during the time of Yugoslavia.
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Apart from Slovene, Serbo-Croatian is the only Slavic language with a pitch accent system.
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Neo-Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian, which is used as the basis for standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian, has four "accents", which involve either a rising or falling tone on either long or short vowels, with optional post-tonic lengths:.
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Serbo-Croatian dialects differ not only in the question word they are named after, but heavily in phonology, accentuation and intonation, case endings and tense system and basic vocabulary.
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Nature and classification of Serbo-Croatian has been the subject of long-standing sociolinguistic debate.
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The question is whether Serbo-Croatian should be called a single language or a cluster of closely related languages.
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Serbo-Croatian's calls BCS a single language for communicative linguistic purposes, but three separate languages for symbolic non-linguistic purposes.
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International Organization for Standardization has specified different Universal Decimal Classification numbers for Croatian and Serbian, while the cover term Serbo-Croatian is used to refer to the combination of original signs .
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The term "Serbo-Croatian" is not officially used in any of the successor countries of former Yugoslavia.
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