Montenegro is a small European country located right on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. Despite its relatively modest size, this state has its own distinctive language.
Montenegrin language
Montenegro, which is also sometimes called Montenegro, has its own state language, which is called Montenegrin. At the same time, the process of acquiring its own language by this small country was by no means simple. So, until 1992, all residents of Montenegro, according to the legislation in force at that time, had to speak the Serbo-Croatian language. In 1992, the country officially recognized its own form of the Serbian language - the Iekava dialect. And only in 2007 the Constitution of the state was adopted, in which Article 13 was devoted specifically to the state language. She, in particular, established that the Montenegrin language becomes such from the moment of the adoption of the Constitution.
Thus, the state status of this language was received less than 10 years ago, and therefore it does not yet have some rules and standards characteristic of more established languages. For example, generally accepted literary standards have not yet been established with respect to the Montenegrin language, which, however, ensures freedom of creativity for writers writing in this language.
Language features
The Montenegrin language belongs to the South Slavic group. Both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets are used in writing, and the use of both is ratified by Article 13 of the Constitution of Montenegro. In many ways, this dialect really resembles Serbo-Croatian, which was previously actively used in the country.
Nevertheless, according to experts in the field of linguistics, there is a fundamental difference between them, which was recorded even at the time when the state language of Montenegro was the Yekava dialect of the Serbian language. The fact is that in Serbia itself and the countries that use its language for communication, the so-called "ekavitsa" has been adopted as opposed to "yekavitsa", which is dominant in the Montenegrin language.
So, this means that words that are similar in meaning in these two languages are pronounced differently. For example, the word "beautiful" in Serbian is written as "lepo" and reads, accordingly, "lepo". In turn, Montenegrins write this word as "lijepo" and read it as "Liepo", putting the same meaning in it.
In addition, due to its geographical proximity to countries belonging to other linguistic groups, for example, Greece and Turkey, Montenegro has in its language a significant number of borrowed words that came to the Montenegrin lexicon from the languages of these states. The fact that there was a period in the history of Montenegro when it was part of Austria-Hungary also played a role here.
