My aren't we looking quite Bosnianesque?

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/08/04 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/08/04/10045672.aspx

So I was thinking about Bosnian yesterday.

It may have had something to do with the fact that I had the announcement about the Cyrillic and Latin Bosnian LIPs forwarded to me yesterday. Making it a TWOFER Tuesday, with twice the LIPs that any single Bosnian LIP release might have had. And pretty much the most Bosnian that you can get without a prescription! :-)

For Windows 7, you can get the Latin Bosnian LIP here, or the Cyrillic Bosnian LIP here, in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds (as per the new policy described in Reporting on 64 bits of awesomesauce!).

Now when you want to install either Bosnian, you must have English, Croatian, or Serbian (Latin) resources installed. I'll talk more about this in a moment....

First a little info about Bosnian:

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS:

4 million

NAME OF THE LANGAUGE IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF:

Either

Bosanski

or

Босанки

Bosnian originates in one of the standard versions of the South Slavic language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian.  It is spoken mainly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, mostly by Bosniaks. Bosniaks are an ethnic group that descended from Slavic converts to Islam during the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans from the 15th to the 19th century. Due to political reasons the name for the language is a controversial issue for the neighboring nations; In Serbia and in Croatia "Bosnian" is officially called "Bosniak". However, internationally linguists use "Bosnian", and the name is used by the ISO-609 standard.

FUN FACT:

Until the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnian was considered just a variant of Serbo-Croatian. It is now, however, beginning to take its very own, distinctive shape: The phoneme "h" has returned in many words, more Islamic-Oriental loan words have been introduced, and there have also been changes in grammar, morphology and orthography that reflect the literary tradition of Bosnian in the early 20th century (during the so-called "Bosnian revival").

CLASSIFICATION:

Bosnian belongs to the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family.  With the Slavic branch, the same subdialect of Shtokavian is also the basis of standard Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin, so all are mutually intelligible.

SCRIPT:

The modern Bosnian language uses the Latin alphabet. However, scripts other than Latin were used much earlier, most notably the indigenous Bosnian Cyrillic called bosančica (literally "Bosnian script") which dates back to the 10th/11th century.

You can find out more about the Bosnian language, Bosnian classification, or Bosnian script, if you'd like.

Now somewhere between all of the following Windows locales/cultures, an interesting story lies:

Note that there is still no unique ISO code for Montenegrin (Montenegro), so that the situation Kieran described back in What's in a name? Part two back in 2006 is still not clarified.

The issues I mentioned in Ask 'em if their language is Montenegrin; their answer may surprise you are not all that further along either.

And also you will notice that if I want to install either of the Bosnian LIPs. only some of these language choices are available; others are either LIPs themselves (and you cannot install a LIP atop another LIP), or they are not ever in the UI language list.

You will also note that Serbian (Latin) is a Language Pack while Serbian (Cyrillic) is a Language Interface Pack. This is an issue I will be talking about further another day....

Enjoy!

John Cowan on 4 Aug 2010 8:02 AM:

Mihai on 5 Aug 2010 10:26 AM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 5 Aug 2010 10:40 AM:

Doug Ewell on 5 Aug 2010 12:56 PM:

Dragan Panjkov on 9 Aug 2010 11:16 PM:

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