Shtokavian

Shtokavian or Štokavian is the prestige supradialect of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language and the basis of its Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standards. It is a part of the South Slavic dialect continuum. Its name comes from the form for the interrogative pronoun for "what": što. This is in contrast to dialects that are exclusive to Croatian language: Kajkavian and Chakavian.
Shtokavian is spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina, much of Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia. The primary subdivisions of Shtokavian are based on three principles: one is different accents, second is the way the old Slavic phoneme yat has changed, and third is the presence of the Young Proto-Slavic isogloss. Modern dialectology generally recognizes seven Shtokavian subdialects.

Early history of Shtokavian

The migrations to the Balkans|early medieval Slavs] who later spoke various Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian dialects migrated across Moldavia and Pannonia. According to Frederik Kortlandt, the shared innovations originate from a "Trans-Carpathian" homeland, and by the 4th and 6th century, "the major dialect divisions of Slavic were already established". Dialectologists and Slavists maintain that when the separation of Western South Slavic speeches happened, they separated into five divergent groups, more specifically two, one Slovene and a second Serbo-Croatian with four divergent groups - Kajkavian, Chakavian, Western Shtokavian and Eastern Shtokavian. The latter group can be additionally divided into a first and second. As noted by Ranko Matasović, "the Shtokavian dialect, on the other hand, was from the earliest times very non-unique, with the Western Shtokavian dialects leaning towards Kajkavian, and the Eastern Shtokavian to Torlakian". According to isoglosses, and presumed end of existence of the common Southwestern Slavic language around the 8th-9th century, the formation of the Proto-Western Shtokavian and Proto-Eastern Shtokavian linguistic and territorial unit would be around the 9th-10th century. According to Ivo Banac in the area of today's Slavonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and on the littoral between the Bay of Kotor and Cetina, medieval Croats spoke an old West Shtokavian dialect, which, some believe, stemmed from Chakavian, while medieval Serbs spoke two dialects, old East Shtokavian and Torlakian. Many linguists noted a close connection between Chakavian and Western Shtokavian, for example Pavle Ivić saw Chakavian as an archaic peripheral zone of Shtokavian, while Dalibor Brozović saw the majority of Chakavian dialects as derived from the same accentological core as Western Shtokavian. Western Shtokavian was principally characterized by a three-accent system, whereas Eastern Shtokavian was mostly marked by a two-accent system.
Western Shtokavian covered the major part of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slavonia and part of Southern Dalmatia in Croatia. Eastern Shtokavian was dominant in Serbia, easternmost Bosnia and Herzegovina and greater parts of Montenegro. From the 12th century, both dialects started separating further from Chakavian and Kajkavian idioms. According to research of historical linguistics, Old-Shtokavian was well established by the mid-15th century. In this period it was still mixed with Church Slavonic to varying degrees. However, the ultimate development of Western Shtokavian and Eastern Shtokavian was not divergent, but convergent. It was the result of migrations, political-cultural border change and also caused by the Ottoman invasion. Initially two separate proto-idioms started to resemble each other so greatly that, according to Brozović, " we can no longer speak of an independent Western Shtokavian, but only about the better or weaker preservation of former West Shtokavian features in some dialects of the unique Shtokavian group of dialects".
As can be seen from the image on the right, originally the Shtokavian dialect covered a significantly smaller area than it covers today, meaning that the Shtokavian speech has spread for the last five centuries, overwhelmingly at the expense of Chakavian and Kajkavian idioms. The modern areal distribution of these three dialects as well as their internal stratification is primarily a result of the migrations resulting from the spread of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans. Migratory waves were particularly strong in the 16th–18th century, bringing about large-scale linguistic and ethnic changes in the Central South Slavic area.
By far the most numerous, mobile and expansionist migrations were those of Ijekavian-Shtokavian speakers of eastern Herzegovina, who have spread into most of Western Serbia, many areas of eastern and western Bosnia, large swathes of Croatia. This is the reason Eastern Herzegovinian is the most spoken Serbo-Croatian dialect today, and why its name is only descriptive of its area of origin. These migrations also played a pivotal role in the spread of Neo-Shtokavian innovations.

Earliest texts of Shtokavian dialect

Proto-Shtokavian, or Church Slavic with elements of nascent Shtokavian, were recorded in legal documents like the charter of Ban Kulin, regulating the commerce between Bosnia and Dubrovnik in Croatia, dated 1189, and in liturgical texts like Gršković's and Mihanović's fragments,, in southern Bosnia or Herzegovina. Experts' opinions are divided with regard to the extent these texts, especially the Kulin ban parchment, contain contemporary Shtokavian vernacular. Numerous legal and commercial documents from pre-Ottoman Bosnia, Hum, Serbia, Zeta, and southern Dalmatia, especially Dubrovnik are mainly Shtokavian, with elements of Church Slavic. The first major comprehensive vernacular Shtokavian text is the Croatian Prayer Book">Croatian language">Croatian Prayer Book, written in Dubrovnik a decade or two before 1400. In the next two centuries Shtokavian vernacular texts had been written mainly in Dubrovnik, other Adriatic cities and islands influenced by Dubrovnik, as well as in Bosnia, by Bosnian Franciscans and Bosnian Muslim vernacular aljamiado literature – the first example being "Chirvat-türkisi" or "Croatian song", dated 1589.

Relationship towards neighboring dialects

Shtokavian is characterized by a number of characteristic historical sound changes, accentual changes, changes in inflection, morphology and syntax. Some of these isoglosses are not exclusive and have also been shared by neighboring dialects, and some of them have mostly but not completely spread over the whole Shtokavian area. The differences between Shtokavian and the unrelated, neighboring Bulgarian–Macedonian dialects are mostly clear-cut, whereas the differences with the related Serbo-Croatian dialects of Chakavian and Kajkavian are much more fluid, and the mutual influence of various subdialects plays a more prominent role.
The main bundle of isoglosses separates Slovenian and Kajkavian on the one hand from Shtokavian and Chakavian on the other. These are:

long falling accent of newer origin
development of the consonant group rj from former soft /r'/ before a vowel
reflexes of /o/ or /ọ/ of the old Common Slavic nasal vowel /ǫ/, and not /u/
inflectional morpheme -o in the instrumental singular of a-declension

Other characteristics distinguishing Kajkavian from Shtokavian, beside the demonstrative/interrogatory pronoun kaj, are:

a reflex of old semivowels of /ẹ/ ; closed /ẹ/ appearing also as a jat reflex
retention of word-final -l
word-initial u- becoming v-
dephonemicization of affricates /č/ and /ć/ to some form of middle value
genitive plural of masculine nouns has the morpheme -of / -ef
syncretized dative, locative and instrumental plural has the ending -ami
the ending -me in the first-person plural present
affix š in the formation of adjectival comparatives
supine
future tense formation in the form of bom/bum došel, došla, došlo

Characteristics distinguishing Chakavian from Shtokavian, beside the demonstrative/interrogatory pronoun ča, are:

preservation of polytonic three-accent system
vocalization of weak jers in word-initial syllables
vowel /a/ as opposed to /e/ after palatal consonants /j/, /č/, /ž/
the appearance of extremely palatal /t'/ or /ć'/ and /j/ either in free positions or in groups št', žd'
depalatalization of /n'/ and /l'/
/ž/ instead of /dʒ/
/č/ > /š/ before consonants
word-initial consonant groups čr-, čri-, čre-
conditional mood with biš in the second-person singular
non-syncretized dative, locative and instrumental plural

General characteristics

General characteristics of Shtokavian are the following:

što or šta as the demonstrative/interrogative pronoun
differentiation between two short accents, rising and falling, though not in all Shtokavian speakers
preservation of unaccented length, but not consistently across all speeches
/u/ as the reflex of Common Slavic back nasal vowel /ǫ/ as well as the syllabic /l/
initial group of v- + weak semivowel yields u-
schwa resulting from the jer merger yields /a/, with the exception of the Zeta-Raška dialect
metathesis of vьse to sve
čr- > cr-, with the exception of Slavonian, Molise and Vlah oasis-Burgenland dialect
word-final -l changes to /o/ or /a/; the exception is the verbal adjective in the Slavonian southwest
ď > /dʑ/ with numerous exceptions
cr > tr in the word trešnja "cherry"; some exceptions in Slavonia, Hungary and Romania
ć and đ from jt, jd ; exceptions in Slavonian and Eastern Bosnian dialect
so-called "new iotation" of dentals and labials, with many exceptions, especially in Slavonia and Bosnia
general loss of phoneme /x/, with many exceptions
ending -ā in genitive plural of masculine and feminine nouns, with many exceptions
ending -u in locative singular of masculine and neuter nouns
augment -ov- / -ev- in the plural of most monosyllabic masculine nouns, with many exceptions
syncretism of dative, locative and instrumental plural of nouns, with many exceptions
preservation of ending -og in genitive and accusative singular of masculine and neuter gender if pronominal-adjectival declension, with exceptions on the area of Dubrovnik and Livno
special form with the ending -a for the neuter gender in nominative plural of pronominal-adjectival declension esta and no ove m
preservation of aorist, which is however missing in some areas
special constructs reflecting old dual for numerals 2–4
many so-called "Turkisms" or "Orientalisms", i.e. words borrowed from Ottoman Turkish

As can be seen from the list, many of these isoglosses are missing from particular Shtokavian idioms, just as many of them are shared with neighboring non-Shtokavian dialects.
There exist three main criteria for the division of Shtokavian dialects:

Accentuation
Yat reflex
Young Proto-Slavic palatal consonant isogloss: *šć-''*žƷ and *št & *žd''. The isogloss developed between 7th and 8/9th century, and the former relates those dialects with Chakavian and Kajkavian, while the latter relates those dialects with Bulgarian.

Accentuation

The Shtokavian dialect is divided into Old-Shtokavian and Neo-Shtokavian subdialects. The primary distinction is the accentuation system: although there are variations, "old" dialects preserve the older accent system, which consists of two types of falling accents, one long and one short, and unstressed syllables, which can be long and short. Both long and short unstressed syllables could precede the stressed syllables. Stress placement is free and mobile in paradigms.
In the process known as "Neo-Shtokavian metatony" or "retraction", length of the old syllables was preserved, but their quality changed. Stress on the inner syllables moved to the preceding syllable, but they kept the high pitch. That process produced the "rising" accents characteristic for Neo-Shtokavian, and yielded the modern four-tone system. Stress on the initial syllables remained the same in quality and pitch.
Most speakers of Shtokavian, native or taught, from Serbia and Croatia do not distinguish between short rising and short falling tones. They also pronounce most unstressed long vowels as short, with some exceptions, such as genitive plural endings.
The following notation is used for Shtokavian accents:

Description	IPA	Traditional	Diacritic
unstressed short		e	–
unstressed long		ē	macron
short rising		è	Grave
long rising		é	Acute
short falling		ȅ	Double grave
long falling		ȇ	Inverted breve

The following table shows the examples of Neo-Shtokavian retraction:
As result of this process, the following set of rules emerged, which are still in effect in all standard variants of Serbo-Croatian:

Falling accents may only occur word-initially.
Rising accents may occur anywhere except word-finally.
* thus, monosyllabic words may only have falling accent.
Unstressed length may only appear after a stressed syllable.

In practice, influx of foreign words and formation of compound words have loosened these rules, especially in spoken idioms, but they are maintained in standard language and dictionaries.

Classification

Old-Shtokavian dialects

Prizren–Timok (Torlakian)

The transitional dialects stretch southwest from the Timok Valley near the Bulgarian border to Prizren. There is disagreement among linguists whether these dialects belong to the Shtokavian area, because there are many other morphological characteristics apart from rendering of što, which would place them into a "transitional" group between Shtokavian and Eastern South Slavic languages. The Timok-Prizren group falls to the Balkan sprachbund: declension has all but disappeared, the infinitive has yielded to subjunctives da-constructions, and adjectives are compared exclusively with prefixes. The accent in the dialect group is a stress accent, and it falls on any syllable in the word. The old semi-vowel has been retained throughout. The vocalic l has been retained, and some dialects don't distinguish ć/č and đ/dž by preferring the latter, postalveolar variants. Some subdialects preserve l at the end of words – došl, znal, etc. ; in others, this l has become the syllable ja.
Torlakian is spoken in Kosovo, around Prizren, Gnjilane, and Štrpce, in Southern Serbia, in the part of Toplica Valley around Prokuplje, in Nišava Valley around Pirot, and Timok Valley ending up with the area around Zaječar, where the Kosovo-Resava dialect becomes more dominant. Few centuries ago, before settlers from Kosovo brought Kosovo-Resava dialect to Eastern Serbia, Torlakian dialects had been overwhelmingly represented in this region.

Slavonian

Also called the Archaic Šćakavian, it is spoken by Croats who live in some parts of Slavonia, Bačka, Baranja, Syrmia, in Croatia and Serbia, as well as in northern Bosnia. It is divided into two subdialects: southern and northern. The Slavonian dialect has mixed Ikavian and Ekavian pronunciations. Ikavian accent is predominant in the Posavina, Baranja, Bačka, and in the Slavonian subdialect enclave of Derventa, whereas Ekavian accent is predominant in Podravina. There are enclaves of one accent in the territory of the other, as well as mixed Ekavian–Ikavian and Jekavian–Ikavian areas. In some villages in Hungary, the original yat is preserved. Local variants can widely differ in the degree of Neo-Shtokavian influences. In two villages in Posavina, Siče and Magića Male, the l, as in the verb nosil, has been retained in place of the modern nosio. In some villages in the Podravina, čr is preserved instead of the usual cr, for example in črn instead of crn. Both forms are usual in Kajkavian but very rare in Shtokavian.

Eastern Bosnian

Also called Jekavian-Šćakavian, Eastern Bosnian dialect has Jekavian pronunciations in the vast majority of local forms and it is spoken by the majority of Bosniaks living in that area, which includes the bigger Bosnian cities Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Zenica, and by most of Croats that live in that area. Together with basic Jekavian pronunciation, mixed pronunciations exist in Tešanj and Maglaj dete–djeteta and around Žepče and Jablanica djete–diteta. In the central area of the subdialect, the diphthong uo exists in some words instead of the archaic l and more common u like vuok or stuop, instead of the standard modern vuk and stup.

Zeta–Raška

Also known as Đekavian-Ijekavian, it is spoken in eastern half of Montenegro and in eastern Raška in Serbia. Its speakers are Serbs, Montenegrins, Bosniaks, and ethnic Muslims. Together with the dominant Ijekavian pronunciation, mixed pronunciations like djete–deteta around Novi Pazar and Bijelo Polje, dijete–đeteta around Podgorica and dete–đeteta in the village of Mrkojevići in southern Montenegro. Mrkojevići are also characterised by retention of čr instead of cr as in the previously mentioned villages in Podravina.
Some vernaculars have a very open /ɛ/ or /æ/ as their reflex of ь/ъ, very rare in other Shtokavian vernaculars. Other phonetic features include sounds like in iʑesti instead of izjesti, as in ɕekira instead of sjekira. However these sounds are known also to many in East Herzegovina like those in Konavle, and are not Zeta–Raška specific. There is a loss of the /v/ sound apparent, seen in čo'ek or đa'ola. The loss of distinction between /ʎ/ and /l/ in some vernaculars is based on a substratum. The word pljesma is a hypercorrection because many vernaculars have changed lj to j.
All verbs in infinitive finish with "t". This feature is also present in most vernaculars of East Herzegovinian, and actually almost all Serbian and Croatian vernaculars.
The group a + o gave ā /aː/, like in other seaside vernaculars. Elsewhere, more common is ao > ō.

Kosovo–Resava

Also called Older Ekavian, is spoken by Serbs, mostly in western and northeastern Kosovo, in Ibar Valley up to Kraljevo, around Kruševac, Trstenik, and in Župa, in the part of Toplica Valley around, in the Morava Valley, in Resava Valley and eastern Serbia. This dialect can be also found in parts of Banatska Klisura in Romania, in places where Romanian Serbs live.
Substitution of jat is predominantly Ekavian accent even on the end of datives, in pronouns, in comparatives in the negative of biti ; in Smederevo–Vršac dialects, Ikavian forms can be found. Smederevo–Vršac dialect is sometimes classified as a subdialect of the Kosovo-Resava dialect but is also considered to be a separate dialect as it the represents mixed speech of Šumadija–Vojvodina and Kosovo–Resava dialects.

Neo-Shtokavian dialects

Younger Ikavian

Also called Western Ikavian. The majority of its speakers are Croats who live in Lika, Kvarner, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, and in north Bačka around Subotica in Serbia and south Bács-Kiskun of Hungary, and in Molise in Italy. The minority speakers of it include Bosniaks in western Bosnia, mostly around the city of Bihać, and also in central Bosnia where Croats and Bosniaks used to speak this dialect. Exclusively Ikavian accent, Bosnian and Herzegovinian forms use o in verb participle, whereas those in Dalmatia and Lika use -ija or ia like in vidija/vidia. Local form of Bačka was proposed as the base for the Danubian branch of the Bunjevac dialect of Bunjevac Croats in Vojvodina, Serbia.

Šumadija–Vojvodina

Also known as Younger Ekavian, is one of the bases for the standard Serbian language. It is spoken by Serbs across most of Vojvodina, wider Belgrade region, western half of Šumadija, Kolubara, Mačva, and in majority ethnic Serb areas in eastern Croatia around the town of Vukovar. It is predominately Ekavian. Most Vojvodina dialects and some dialects in Šumadija have an open e and o. However the vernaculars of western Serbia, and in past to them connected vernaculars of Belgrade and southwestern Banat are as close to the standard as a vernacular can be. The dialect presents a base for the Ekavian variant of the Serbian standard language.

Eastern Herzegovinian

Also called Eastern Herzegovinian or Neo-Ijekavian. It encompasses by far the largest area and the number of speakers of all Shtokavian dialects. It is the dialectal basis of the standard literary Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Montenegrin languages.
A specific idiom which is often grouped with Eastern Herzegovinian is Dubrovnik subdialect. Also known as Western Ijekavian, in earlier centuries, this subdialect was an independent subdialect of Western Shtokavian dialect. After migrations and Neo-Shtokavisation, it preserved features which are different to Eastern Herzegovinian. It has a mixed Shtokavian and Chakavian vocabulary, with some words from Dalmatian, older Venetian and modern Italian.
Micro groups:

western Montenegro – spoken south Ijekavian variant.
Croats western Ijekavian variant micro groups in region Slavonia, Banovina, Kordun, Žumberak, Neretva, East Herzegovina, wider Dubrovnik region, and is the basis of the Croatian standard. Cities and towns:.
Serbs east Ijekavian variant groups; East Bosnia, East Herzegovina, Bosanska Krajina, southwestern Serbia and Podrinje. Cities and towns: Trebinje, Bijeljina, Banja Luka, Prijedor, Istočno Sarajevo.
Its south-eastern form is characterised by the total lack of sound that is sometimes not only left out or replaced by more common or but is replaced as well by less common and . Local forms in the Žumberak enclave and around Dubrovnik or Slunj have some special Croatian features, influenced from Chakavian and the western subdialect, whereas forms in Bjelovar or Pakrac are influenced from Kajkavian.

Yat reflexes

The Proto-Slavic vowel jat
has changed over time, coming to be pronounced differently in different areas. These different reflexes define three "pronunciations" of Shtokavian:

In Ekavian pronunciation, jat has conflated into the vowel e
in Ikavian pronunciation, it has conflated into the vowel i
in Ijekavian or Jekavian pronunciation, it has come to be pronounced ije or je, depending on whether the vowel was long or short. In standard Croatian, pronunciation is always Jekavian: when yat is short then it is , and when yat is long then it is .

Historically, the yat reflexes had been inscribed in Church Slavic texts before the significant development of Shtokavian dialect, reflecting the beginnings of the formative period of the vernacular. In early documents it is predominantly Church Slavic of the Serbian or Croatian recension. The first undoubted Ekavian reflex is found in a document from Serbia dated 1289; the first Ikavian reflex in Bosnia in 1331; and first Ijekavian reflex in Croatia in 1399. Partial attestation can be found in earlier texts, but philologists generally accept the aforementioned dates. In the second half of the 20th century, many vernaculars with unsubstituted yat are found. The intrusion of the vernacular into Church Slavic grew in time, to be finally replaced by the vernacular idiom. This process took place for Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks independently and without mutual interference until the mid-19th century. Historical linguistics, textual analysis and dialectology have dispelled myths about allegedly "unspoilt" vernacular speech of rural areas: for instance, it is established that Bosniaks have retained phoneme "h" in numerous words, due to elementary religious education based on the Quran, where this phoneme is the carrier of specific semantic value.
The Ekavian pronunciation, sometimes called Eastern, is spoken primarily in Serbia, and in small parts of Croatia. The Ikavian pronunciation, sometimes called Western, is spoken in western and central Bosnia, western Herzegovina, some of Slavonia and the major part of Dalmatia in Croatia. The Ijekavian pronunciation, sometimes called Southern, is spoken in central Croatia, most of Slavonia, southern Dalmatia, most of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, as well as some parts of western Serbia. The following are some generic examples:

English	Predecessor	Ekavian	Ikavian	Ijekavian
time	vrěme	vreme	vrime	vrijeme
beautiful	lěp	lep	lip	lijep
girl	děvojka	devojka	divojka	djevojka
true	věran	veran	viran	vjeran
to sit	sědĕti	sedeti	siditi	sjediti
to grow gray hairs	sěděti	sedeti	siditi	sijediti
to heat	grějati	grejati	grijati	grijati

Long ije is pronounced as a single syllable,, by many Ijekavian speakers, especially in Croatia. However, in Zeta dialect and most of East Herzegovina dialect, it is pronounced as two syllables,, which is the Croatian official standard too, but seldom actually practiced. This distinction can be clearly heard in first verses of national anthems of Croatia and Montenegro—they're sung as "L'je-pa na-ša do-mo-vi-no" and "Oj svi-je-tla maj-ska zo-ro" respectively.
The Ikavian pronunciation is the only one that is not part of any standard variety of Serbo-Croatian today, though it was a variant used for a significant literary output between the 15th and 18th centuries. This has led to a reduction in its use and an increase in the use of Ijekavian in traditionally Ikavian areas since the standardization. For example, most people in formerly fully Ikavian Split, Croatia today use both Ikavian and Ijekavian words in everyday speech, without a clearly predictable pattern.
The IETF language tags have assigned the variants and to Ekavian and Ijekavian pronunciations, respectively.

Ethnic affiliation of native speakers of Shtokavian dialect

During the first half of the 19th century, protagonists of nascent Slavic philology were, as far as South Slavic dialects were concerned, embroiled in frequently bitter polemic about "ethnic affiliation" of native speakers of various dialects. This, from contemporary point of view, rather bizarre obsession was motivated primarily by political and national interests that prompted philologists-turned-ideologues to express their views on the subject. The most prominent contenders in the squabble, with conflicting agenda, were the Czech philologist Josef Dobrovský, the Slovak Pavel Šafárik, the Slovenes Jernej Kopitar and Franz Miklosich, the Serb Vuk Karadžić, the Croat of Slovak origin Bogoslav Šulek, and the Croatians Vatroslav Jagić and Ante Starčević.
The dispute was primarily concerned with who can, philologically, be labelled as "Slovene", "Croat" and "Serb" with the aim of expanding one's national territory and influence. Born in the climate of romanticism and national awakening, these polemical battles led to increased tensions between the aforementioned nations, especially because the Shtokavian dialect cannot be split along ethnic lines in an unequivocal manner.
However, contemporary native speakers, after process of national crystallization and identification had been completed, can be roughly identified as predominant speakers of various Shtokavian subdialects. Because standard languages propagated through media have strongly influenced and altered the situation in the 19th century, the following attribution must be treated with necessary caution.
The distribution of Old-Shtokavian speakers along ethnic lines in present times is as follows:

Timok-Prizren dialect: Serbs
Kosovo-Resava dialect: Serbs
Zeta-Raška dialect : Montenegrins, Bosniaks, and Serbs.
Slavonian dialect : Croats
Eastern Bosnian dialect : Bosniaks and Croats

Generally, the Neo-Shtokavian dialect is divided as follows with regard to the ethnicity of its native speakers:

Šumadija-Vojvodina dialect : Serbs
Dalmatian-Bosnian dialect : Croats and Bosniaks
Eastern Herzegovinian : Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, and Bosniaks

Group	Sub-Dialect	Serbian	Croatian	Bosnian	Montenegrin
Old-Shtokavian	Timok-Prizren	x
Old-Shtokavian	Kosovo-Resava	x
Old-Shtokavian	Zeta-Raška	x		x	x
Old-Shtokavian	Slavonian		x
Old-Shtokavian	Eastern Bosnian		x	x
Neo-Shtokavian	Šumadija-Vojvodina	x
Neo-Shtokavian	Dalmatian-Bosnian		x	x
Neo-Shtokavian	Eastern Herzgovinian	x	x	x	x

Standard language

The standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian variants of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian standard language are all based on the Neo-Shtokavian dialect.
However, it must be stressed that standard variants, irrespectively of their mutual differences, have been stylised in such manners that parts of the Neo-Shtokavian dialect have been retained but other features were purposely omitted or altered.
Croatian has had a long tradition of Shtokavian vernacular literacy and literature. It took almost four and half centuries for Shtokavian to prevail as the dialectal basis for the Croatian standard. In other periods, Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects, as well as hybrid Chakavian–Kajkavian–Shtokavian interdialects "contended" for the Croatian national koine, but eventually lost, mainly due to historical and political reasons. By the 1650s it was fairly obvious that Shtokavian would become the dialectal basis for the Croatian standard, but this process was finally completed in the 1850s, when Neo-Shtokavian Ijekavian, based mainly on Ragusan, Dalmatian, Bosnian, and Slavonian literary heritage became the national standard language.
Serbian was much faster in standardisation. Although vernacular literature was present in the 18th century, it was Vuk Karadžić who, between 1818 and 1851, made a radical break with the past and established Serbian Neo-Shtokavian folklore idiom as the basis of standard Serbian. Although he wrote in Serbian Ijekavian accent, the majority of Serbs have adopted Ekavian accent, which is dominant in Serbia. Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia, as well as Montenegrins, use the Ijekavian accent.
Bosnian is only currently beginning to take shape. The Bosniak idiom can be seen as a transition between Serbian Ijekavian and Croatian varieties, with some specific traits. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosniaks affirmed their wish to stylize their own standard language, based on the Neo-Shtokavian dialect, but reflecting their characteristics, from phonetics to semantics.
Also, the contemporary situation is unstable with regard to the accentuation, because phoneticians have observed that the 4-accents speech has, in all likelihood, shown to be increasingly unstable, which resulted in proposals that a 3-accents norm be prescribed. This is particularly true for Croatian, where, contrary to all expectations, the influence of Chakavian and Kajkavian dialects on the standard language has been waxing, not waning, in the past 50–70 years.
The Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian standard variants, although all based on the East Herzegovinian subdialect of Neo-Shtokavian and mutually intelligible, do differ slightly, as is the case with other pluricentric languages, but not to a degree which would justify considering them as different languages. Their structures are grammatically and phonologically almost identical, but have differences in vocabulary and semantics: "Lexical differences between the ethnic variants are extremely limited, even when compared with those between closely related Slavic languages, and grammatical differences are even less pronounced. More importantly, complete understanding between the ethnic variants of the standard language makes translation and second language teaching impossible."
In 2017, numerous prominent writers, scientists, journalists, activists and other public figures from Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia, signed the Declaration on the Common Language, which states that in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia, a common polycentric standard language is used, consisting of several standard varieties, similar to the situation in German, English, or Spanish.