As a result of the civil war and the political divide in the 1990s, Bosnia and Herzegovina has three official languages, Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian. According to the CIA World Factbook, 52.9 percent use Bosnian as their mother tongue, while 30.8 and 14.6 percent use Serbian and Croatian as their mother tongue (2013).

The dialogues in Bosnia-Herzegovina are relatively uniform, and the spoken language of Serbs , Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) is the same. However, the writing language has been differentiated in different ways. The language was called Serbo-Croatian or Croatian Serbian in the 1974 Constitution and was a common written language in the 1970s and 1980s in an intermediate position between Serbian and Croatian.

The differences between the three written languages ​​are smaller than between Bokmål and New Norwegian. In the Serb-controlled areas called language Serbian, and there used the same language as that in Serbia, except ijekaviske forms in any word (dijete ‘children’, against the detested in Serbia). In the Croatian-controlled areas, the language is called Croatian, and the same language is used as in Croatia. The Bosnians call the language Bosnian and are about to standardize their own standard, different from Serbian and Croatian (see Bosnian).

The Bosniaks and Croats use the Latin alphabet. In the Serbian-controlled areas (Republika Srpska), as in Serbia, mainly the Cyrillic alphabet is used.