At the beginning of the 19th century, Church Slavonic was the official language in Serbia. Moreover, its Russian version. The so-called Slavic-Serbian language was literary in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. Sometimes it is called Slovenian. Not to be confused with another Slovenian language, now the official language of the Republic of Slovenia. That Slovenian language with a long and rich history. He, or rather his direct ancestor, was the spoken language of most of the population of the medieval Holy Roman Empire. The official language there was Latin, and the aristocrats preferred German.
Slavic-Serbian is considered to be a mixture of Church Slavonic, Russian literary and Old Church Slavonic. Although most of all it resembles the Russian literary one. Slavic-Serbian could well become the official language of independent Serbia. However, it lost in the ideological competition to the modern Serbian language - the brainchild of Vuk Karadzic.
Karadzic created a new Serbian language in the 19th century based on the Herzegovinian dialect with an admixture of Croatian vocabulary. He also invented his own alphabet - the vukovitch. He threw out some unnecessary, in his opinion, letters from the Cyrillic alphabet and added several new ones.
It is noteworthy that at about the same time, on the basis of the same Herzegovinian dialect, Ludevit Gai created the Croatian language. It is not surprising that his Croatian language turned out to be more similar to the Serbian language of Karadzic than to the spoken Croatian dialects. The difference lies mainly in the writing. In the Croatian language, the writing is based on a slightly modified Czech version of the Latin alphabet - Gajevica.
In the 20th century, during the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, linguists combined the two languages into one - Serbo-Croatian. In the days of Yugoslavia, separatist-minded scholars separated the Bosnian language from the Serbo-Croatian language. The final divorce between the three languages took place in the 90s of the 20th century. Although many experts continue to consider Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian as one language, since the differences between them are minor.
Currently, after the declaration of independence of Montenegro, work is actively underway to create a new Montenegrin language …