The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.)

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1922)

Serbo-Croat is an umbrella term, used to describe the closely-related languages of Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian. As the former Yugoslavia has broken down into individual states, the name Serbo-Croat is less used, and people now tend to identify each of those languages separately.

There is a combined total of roughly 16 million speakers, in at least 23 territories. Speakers are well spread throughout Europe, and there are also significant numbers in Australia and the United States.

Colour Key

North America

Central America

Caribbean

South America

Northern Europe

Central Europe

Eastern Europe

Southern Europe

Southern Africa

Northern Africa

Western Africa

Central Africa

Eastern Africa

Russia

Central Asia

Western Asia

Southern Asia

Eastern Asia

Australasia

Southeastern Asia

Pacific Oceania

Reference Map

Map No.

651

Topic(s)

Identity - Language

Migration from Croatia 1990-2017

Migration from Serbia 1990-2017

Serbia / Kosovo / Montenegro Gridded Population

Croatia Gridded Population

Technical Notes

Territory size shows the proportion of all people who speak Serbo-Croat as a first language that live in that territory. This map removes the countries where serbo-croat is dominant. This map therefore only shows 9.7% of all speakers of serbo-croat. The territories omitted are Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia andMontenegro

Definition
The maps in the 2005 language data series are made from data on the number of people speaking a language as their first-language, that is the language they would use at home.

Data sources
This map uses data several sources, the main one being Ethnologue (15th Edition, 2005). Estimating the number of speakers of a language is fraught with difficulty on several levels (last accessed January 2009). We aim to map as complete data as possible and therefore estimate data for missing values. The language numbers we use and publish are rough estimates, and should not be taken as definitive. In some cases, missing data for very small territories is not used in the cartogram and that area is therefore omitted in the map.

Further notes on the data, as well as all modifications to the original data source are noted in our data sheets.

Download data file