Serbo-Croatian

Serbo-Croatian is the western South Slavic language of the western Balkans, spoken across Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro in a chain of dialects. Early medieval Slavic migrants brought it into the region, and by the ninth or tenth century the speech had divided into Kajkavian, Chakavian and the Shtokavian dialects that later became the prestige form.

Its oldest surviving texts, from the eleventh century, are in the Glagolitic alphabet; medieval writers also used Cyrillic and Latin, the earliest complete Latin-script text being dated 1345. From the fifteenth century the Ottoman conquest uprooted whole populations, and Shtokavian spread with the migrants at the expense of Chakavian and Kajkavian.

In the early nineteenth century Vuk Karadžić rebuilt Serbian Cyrillic on phonemic principles and Ljudevit Gaj devised a matching Croatian Latin alphabet; the name Serbo-Croatian itself was coined by Jacob Grimm in 1824.