Bunjevac dialect

The Bunjevac dialect (bunjevački dijalekt), also known as Bunjevac speech (bunjevački govor), is a Neo-Shtokavian Younger Ikavian dialect of the Serbo-Croatian pluricentric language, preserved among members of the Bunjevac community living mostly in region of Bačka of northern Serbia; Bács-Kiskun County (particularly in Baja and surroundings) of southern Hungary. It is also found in Croatia (Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, Lika-Senj County, Split-Dalmatia County, Osijek-Baranja County, Vukovar-Srijem County); and in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They presumably originate from western Herzegovina. Their accent is purely Ikavian, with /i/ for the Common Slavic vowels yat.

Bunjevac dialect is one of the official languages in the City of Subotica, since 2021. That same year, Croatia added the Bunjevac dialect to the list of protected intangible cultural heritage. Within the Bunjevac community itself as well as between Serbia and Croatia there is an ongoing debate about the status of Bunjevac speech.

There have been three meritorious people who preserved the Bunjevac dialect in two separate dictionaries: Grgo Bačlija and Marko Peić with "Rečnik bački Bunjevaca" (editions 1990, 2018), and Ante Sekulić with "Rječnik govora bačkih Hrvata" (2005).

According to data from the 2022 Serbian, 3,319 people declared Bunjevac as their mother tongue. Serbian census questionnaire lists Bunjevac dialect as Bunjevac language thus contradicting with the official stance of both the Serbian government and Matica Srpska, that classifies Bunjevac speech as a dialect.

Opinions on the status of the Bunjevac dialect remain divided. Bunjevac speech is considered a dialect or vernacular of the Serbo-Croatian pluricentric language, by linguists, and part of the southern Slavic dialect continuum. It is noted by Andrew Hodges that it is mutually intelligible with the standard Serbian and Croatian varieties. Popularly, the Bunjevac dialect is often referred to as "Bunjevac language" (bunjevački jezik) or Bunjevac mother tongue (bunjevački materni jezik). At the political level, depending on goal and content of the political lobby, the general confusion concerning the definition of the terms language, dialect, speech, mother tongue, is cleverly exploited, resulting in an inconsistent use of the terms.

In the old Austro-Hungarian censuses, Bunjevac was declared as a native language of numerous citizens (for example in the city of Subotica 33,247 people declared Bunjevac as their native language in 1910). During the existence of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, members of the Bunjevac ethnic community mostly declared themselves as speaking Serbo-Croatian.

According to data from the 2002 Serbian census, many members of the Bunjevac community declared their native language to be either Serbian or Croatian. This does not mean that they do not use this specific dialect, but merely that they ddin't consider it at the time sufficiently distinct from the aforementioned standard languages to register as speakers of a separate language. However, those Bunjevci who declared Bunjevac to be their native language consider it a separate language.

There is an ongoing effort among the members of the Bunjevac community for affirmation of their dialect in Serbia, Croatia, and Hungary.