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NOTE ON THE LANGUAGE

What to call the common tongue spoken in Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina is a matter of some controversy. Many readers will remember past times when it was referred to as Serbo-Croat, but this is outdated now. In Montenegro there seem to be two main schools of thought. One is that the language is Serbian and should be named as such. Advocates of this approach maintain that citizens of the USA have no problem saying they speak English and have not attempted to rename it ‘American’. On the other hand, proponents of calling the language Montenegrin claim that there are enough differences, subtle though they may be, for it to be a separate language and that as a source of national pride, it should bear the name of the country.

Equally confusing – to an English speaker – is the interchangeable use of two alphabets: the Latin and the Cyrillic (again with a few small differences from the Russian/Serbian versions). A professor of the Montenegrin language turned estate agent whom I asked about this said that in schools, the time spent using each alphabet is equally divided. Most people seem to fiercely protect this system. Recently, it was proposed that school certificates would be issued in the Latin alphabet only, and parents would have to pay if they wanted them in Cyrillic, which sparked nationwide outrage.

I have settled on using the term Montenegrin for this book, though you will note that Sophie’s language learning book is called Total Serbian. You will not find language primers in any shop that I know of that promote the learning of a tongue called Montenegrin, which is probably unsurprising when the population, at less than 650,000, is so tiny.