Editing Bosnian language (section)

===Standardization===
[[File:Azbuka BH.svg|thumb|left|upright=3|Old Bosnian alphabets: ''[[Bosnian Cyrillic|bosančica]]'' (top line) and ''[[arebica]]'' (bottom line), compared with contemporary ''[[Gaj's Latin alphabet|latinica]]'' (middle line)]]
[[File:WIKITONGUES- Mirela speaking Bosnian.webm|thumb|A Bosnian speaker, recorded in [[Kosovo]]]]
[[File:RacsunBosanskiJezik1827.jpg|thumb|School book of Latin and Bosnian, 1827]]
[[File:Gramatika bosanskog jezika.jpg|thumb|Bosnian Grammar, 1890]]

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Although Bosnians are, at the level of [[vernacular|vernacular idiom]], [[linguistically]] more [[homogeneous]] than either Serbians or Croatians, unlike those nations they failed to [[codification (linguistics)|codify]] a standard language in the 19th century, with at least two factors being decisive:

*The Bosnian elite, as closely intertwined with Ottoman life, wrote predominantly in foreign (Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish) languages.<ref>{{Cite web|url = http://www.ghb.ba/index.php/en/about-us/new-building/61-english/about-us/colletcions|title = Collection of printed books in Arabic, Turkish and Persian|date = 2014-05-16|access-date = 2014-05-16|website = Gazi Husrev-begova biblioteka|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20140517151418/http://www.ghb.ba/index.php/en/about-us/new-building/61-english/about-us/colletcions|archive-date = 2014-05-17|url-status = dead}}</ref> [[Vernacular literature]] written in Bosnian with the [[Arebica]] script was relatively thin and sparse.
*The Bosnians' national emancipation lagged behind that of the Serbs and Croats and because denominational rather than cultural or linguistic issues played the pivotal role, a Bosnian language project did not arouse much interest or support amongst the intelligentsia of the time.

The modern Bosnian standard took shape in the 1990s and 2000s. Lexically, Islamic-Oriental loanwords are more frequent; phonetically: the phoneme /x/ (letter ''h'') is reinstated in many words as a distinct feature of [[nonstandard dialect|vernacular]] Bosniak speech and language tradition; also, there are some changes in grammar, morphology and orthography that reflect the Bosniak pre-[[World War I]] literary tradition, mainly that of the Bosniak renaissance at the beginning of the 20th century.