Linguistic Situation in Former Republic of Yugoslavia
Serbia and Montenegro appeared the official title of the country as of February 4, 2003, as a result of the evolution of restructuring the country formerly known as The SFRY. Serbia and Montenegro is the largest share of the dissolved Socialistic Federative Republic of Yugoslavia and consists of two states: Serbia and Montenegro.
Inside Serbia, there are two quasi-independent regions, Vojvodina and Kosovo. Kosovo has been under the protectorate of the UN from 1999. Linguistic politics and manipulations of time, title status and names of various languages played an important part in the numerous intra-national conflicts that happened from 1990 to 1999 and it is yet a very sensitive issue in the total area of the peninsula. Best Italian translation
The official language of the Republic of Serbia is Serbian (with over 6 000 000 speakers in the area of Serbia without Kosovo, or 88% of the population); the same legal status is allowed to both the Cyrillic and the Roman spelling, but the former is preferred for Serbian state administration. Less spread languages, which are also in governmental use in the parts where they are spoken, are Hungarian (in line with the 2002 census data of the StatsOffice of the Republic of Serbia, approximated at 286 500 speakers), Bosnian (134 500 people), Romanian (82 000 speakers), Albanian (63 500 citizens), 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 tongues are used at all stages of education: in primary schools, high schools, and at technical schools and universities. The first linguistic effect of the political and ethnic processes of the last decade of XX century is that the language that previously was officially called Serbo-Croat has received several new nationally and politically grounded names. As a result, the titles Serbo-Croat, Bosnianare governmentally engaged and refer to the same tongue with possible slight variations. The language has a couple general dialects, Ekavian and Ijekavian.
But, as a rule, Ekavian is spoken more in Serbia (and parts of Croatia), and Ijekavian is spoken more in Montenegro (and also in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and parts of Croatia), these variations do not coincide with the ethnically motivated titles.
The linguistic situation in Kosovo is less clear at present, because about 300 000 refugees from this region, mostly Serbs, are still on the stage of returning to their places. This fact makes the figures of speakers reported unpredictable. Today, by the authority of Kosovo, about 1 670 000, or 88% of the inhabitants of Kosovo, speak Albanian, and about 133 000, or 7%, are speakers of Serbian. The rest of the population (5%) speaks mostly Romanian, Bosnian, Greek. HQ-translate: translate into Greek
The official language of the Republic of Montenegro is Serbian, but there are recent developments to introduce the name Montenegrin, either parallel to or instead of the name Serbian. Similar as with Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, this term addresses the one language that was called Serbo-Croat, and is rather a subject of governmental resolutions 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 around 401 500, or 60% of the citizens 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.