# Does Croatian contain more Slavic words than Serbian/Bosnian?



## Nikined

Is it true that Croatian is "more Slavic" than Serbian lexically, with more Slavic words instead of Western borrowings? And what about Bosnian, I haven't known of it as much?


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## Lazar_Bgd

Nikined said:


> Is it true that Croatian is "more Slavic" than Serbian lexically, with more Slavic words instead of Western borrowings? And what about Bosnian, I haven't known of it as much?


Indeed, Serbian tends to use more of foreign words than Croatian. E.g. "football" is "fudbal" in Serbian and "nogomet" in Croatian. As for Bosnian, I think it depends on the region (i.e. ethnicity) but I stand to be corrected.


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## Awwal12

Lazar_Bgd said:


> Indeed, Serbian tends to use more of foreign words than Croatian. E.g. "football" is "fudbal" in Serbian and "nogomet" in Croatian.


The Croatian standard is known for having been artificially purified (much like, say, Czech); Serbian has simply avoided that and effectively contains more foreign loans and less calques or newly invented words.


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## Anemona61

One example comes to my mind immediately: names for the months. In Croatian they have Slavic origin and in Serbian they are Latin-derived.


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## Nikined

Awwal12 said:


> artificially purified


Do you mean that Croats used borrowings as Serbs at first, but then decided to substitute them with new Slavic words? And do you know about Bosnian, is it "between" the two languages?


Awwal12 said:


> effectively


Is this supposed to mean "as a result"?


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## Awwal12

Nikined said:


> Is this supposed to mean "as a result"?


Yes, of course.


Nikined said:


> Do you mean that Croats used borrowings as Serbs at first, but then decided to substitute them with new Slavic words?


Basically. Using borrowings is a generally more natural course of events by default (if not prevented or limited by certain objective factors like unusual morphology of the language etc.).


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## cHr0mChIk

Nikined said:


> And do you know about Bosnian, is it "between" the two languages?


Bosnian would be closer to Serbian
(In this aspect but I'd say in many others as well)

Because both Croatian and Bosnian use "ije" as a reflection of the old Slavic "yat" vowel, it gives an impression that they are close to one another, Serbian being the different, odd one.

However, in reality, Croatian has a lot of vocabulary which is unique to it, while Serbian and Bosnian share words for the same term.

This has to do with the process of the artificial purification which was mentioned before.


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## polskajason

It's not always the result of purification, which created neologisms that aren't popularly used (like zrakoplov and brzoglas). The language/variant exists on a continuum between Slovenian and Serbian, and more often than not, when a term differs between Serbian and Croatian, the Croatian term is the same as or similar to the Slovenian term (kruh, zrak, vlak, etc.)


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