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Language code: bs

Technical information about ISO 639 language code bs

Documentation

The table below provides technical details for the Bosnian language, designated by the bs code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

bs

Name

Official

Bosnian

Native

Bosanski

Family
South Slavic
Scripts
Latin
Cyrillic
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Language varieties
Ijekavian Štokavian
Related languages
CroatianSerbianMontenegrin
Key facts
Written in both Latin and Cyrillic scripts, though Latin is dominantStandard Bosnian derives from the Eastern Herzegovinian Neo-Štokavian Ijekavian dialectVocabulary contains many Turkish, Arabic and Persian loanwords from the Ottoman periodRetains the phoneme “h” in words where Croatian or Serbian often omit it (e.g., kahva vs. kafa/kava)One of the earliest works in the language is the Bosnian–Turkish dictionary compiled by Muhamed Hevaji Uskufi in 1631.
Sample phrase

Zdravo, kako si?

Character encodings

UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Bosnian belongs to the Indo-European language family, more specifically to the South Slavic subgroup. It is used as an official language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, alongside Serbian and Croatian. It is also recognized as a minority language in Serbia, Croatia, and Montenegro. Bosnian is written using the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. It is estimated that there are more than 1.7 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

Bosnia and Herzegovina

1.7M

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Bosnian speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

bs-Cyrl – Bosnian (Cyrillic)

bs-Cyrl-BA – Bosnian (Cyrillic, Bosnia and Herzegovina)

bs-Latn – Bosnian (Latin)

bs-Latn-BA – Bosnian (Latin, Bosnia and Herzegovina)

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