Mothertongue Situation in Balkan Region
Serbia and Montenegro gained the public title of the country as of February 4, 2003, as a result of the evolution of transformation of the country formerly known as The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Serbia and Montenegro is the largest share of the former SFRY and made up of two republics: Serbia and Montenegro.
Inside Serbia, there are two quasi-independent provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo. Kosovo has been under the supervision of the UN from 1999. Linguistic policy and manipulations of time, official standards and names of various tongues took an important role in the number of intra-national conflicts that broke out from 1990 to 1999 and it is yet a very delicate issue in the total territory of the peninsula. Quality Italian translation
The state language of the Republic of Serbia is Serbian (with over 6 000 000 speakers in the territory of Serbia without Kosovo, or 88% of the population); the same judicial status is allowed to both the Cyrillic and the Roman spelling, but the former is favored for Serbian state administration. Less spread languages, which are also in official use in the regions where they are spoken, are Hungarian (in line with the 2002 census info of the Statistical Institute of the Republic of Serbia, estimated at 286 500 speakers), Bosnian (134 500 people), Romanian (82 000 speakers), Albanian (63 500 speakers), Slovakian (57 500 speakers), Valachian (55 000 speakers), Romanian (34 500 speakers), Croatian (27 500 speakers), Bulgarian (16 500 speakers), and Macedonian (14 500 speakers). Local tongues are used at all stages of education: in early schools, gymnasiums, and at colleges and academies. One linguistic effect of the political and ethnic processes of the last decade of XX century is that the language that used to be officially called Serbo-Croat has received a number of new nationally and politically based titles. As a result, the titles Serbo-Croat, Bosnianare governmentally engaged and refer to the same language with possible few changes. The language has a couple major dialects, Ekavian and Ijekavian.
Although, as a rule, Ekavian is spread 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 names.
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 homes. This situation makes the numbers of speakers reported unpredictable. Today, by the authority of Kosovo, about 1 670 000, or 88% of the citizens of Kosovo, speak Albanian, and about 133 000, or 7%, are speakers of Serbian. The remains of the people (5%) speaks mostly Romanian, Bosnian, Greek. HQ-translate: translate into Greek
The official language of the Republic of Montenegro is Serbian, but there are modern tendencies to enter the term Montenegrin, either equal to or instead of the term Serbian. Similar as with Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, this term refers to the one language that was called Serbo-Croat, and is rather a matter of political decisions 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 inhabitants 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.