Most of the citizens of Montenegro consider Serbian to be their official language while a small percentage considers Montenegrin as their first language. However, linguistically, they are the same language. Montenegrin belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. The language is considered a dialect of the Serbo- Croatian. The Montenegrin language uses the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabet. However, the use of Cyrillic alphabets has been opposed for quite some time by linguists. For this reason, the use of Latin alphabet is slowly taking over. Montenegrin uses the Yugoslav Braille. The Montenegrin alphabet has 25 consonants and 5 vowels.
In 2011, there were approximately 232, 600 native Montenegrin speakers. The rest of Montenegrins speak other languages such as Bosnian and Croatian as their first language. Most of the Montenegrin Native speakers are located in the countries of Montenegro and Serbia. There have been controversies regarding whether the more accurate name for the language is Montenegrin or Serbian. In a census conducted in the country in 2011, 36.97% of the population (229,251) declared Montenegrin as their native language, and 42.88% (265,895) declared Serbian their native language. Albanians form approximately 5% of the Montenegrin population.
All the letters in Montenegrin words can be pronounced in a sentence. This makes it easier to pronounce Montenegrin words compared to other languages. Montenegrin has a close relationship to several languages. This is probably due to evolution or loaning of words. For instance "to organiz"’ translates to "organizovati", "to construct" translates to "konstruisati". The language is also closely similar to Bosnian and Croatian. In fact, there has been a lot of word borrowed from Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin, explaining the similarity in many words and phrases.
Apart from Montenegrin, there are also a few minority languages spoken in the country. These languages include Albanian, Bosnian and Croatian. In fact, Albanian has been recognized to be the official language of some of the municipalities in the country. These municipalities are Podgorica, Ulcinj, Bar, Pljevlja, Rozaje, and Tuzi. Furthermore, there are a few Italian natives in Montenegro. They are concentrated in the Bay of Kotor. The number of the Italian speakers in Montenegro is in the several hundreds.
This page was last modified on May 1st, 2018
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