The Bunjevac dialect (), also known as Bunjevac speech (), is a Neo-Shtokavian Younger Ikavian dialect of the Serbo-Croatian pluricentric language, preserved among members of the Bunjevac community. Their accent is purely Ikavian, with /i/ for the Common Slavic vowels yat. There are three branches of the Neo-Shtokavian Younger Ikavian dialect: Dalmatian, Danubian, and Littoral-Lika. Its speakers largely use the Latin alphabet and are living in parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, different parts of Croatia, southern parts (inc. Budapest) of Hungary as well in northern parts of the autonomous province Vojvodina of Serbia. Bunjevac dialect has been included in the list of official public administrative languages of the Subotica Municipality in Serbia since 2021. And Croatia added in 2021 the Bunjevac dialect to the list of protected intangible cultural heritage. Within the Bunjevac community and between Serbia and Croatia is for several decades an ongoing language battle about the status of Bunjevac speech.
Dictionary
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).
"Bunjevac dialect of the hinterland of Senje with special consideiration of emphasis." Grga Tomljenović. Croatia. 1984 Bunjevac phrases and proverbs in Gara, Hungary. "Bunjevačke fraze i poslovice u Gari". Tomislav Krekić. 2016 Bunjevac speech in Tavankut, Serbia. "Govor Tavankuta". Mirjana Crnković. 2015
Number of speakers
In the 2002 census results published by the Statistical Office of Serbia, Bunjevac speech was not listed among main languages spoken in Serbia, but those that declared that their language is Bunjevac were listed in category "other languages". For example, in the municipality of Subotica, the number of those listed as speaking "other languages" (presumably Bunjevac) was 8,914.
According to the 2011 census in Serbia, 6,835 people declared Bunjevac dialect as their mother tongue (bunjevački maternji jezik) and it was listed independently.
Status
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. 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" () or Bunjevac mother tongue (). 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 (for example one from 1910), 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 the 2002 census in Serbia, some members of the Bunjevac community declared that their native language to be Serbian or Croatian. This does not mean that they do not use this specific dialect, but merely that they do not consider it 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.
The dialect, of the in Serbia residating Danubian Bunjevci, was standardised in the Republic of Serbia in 2018 and officially approved as a standard dialect by the Ministry of Education for teaching in schools. With the standardisation of the Bunjevac dialect, activists and members of the Bunjevac National Council are striving for language secession, with the political aim that the Bunjevac dialect will gain in Serbia the political-linguistic status of independent language. Theodora Vuković has provided, in 2009, the scientific methodology for the finalization of the standardisation process of the Bunjevac dialect corpus in Serbia, classified as the Serbian Bunjevac dialect variety of the Danubian branch of the Neo-Shtokavian Younger Ikavian dialect. Speakers use in general the standardised dialect variety for writing and conversation in formal situations.