three official languages of the former Yugoslavia—Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian. They belong to the southern branch of the Slavic Languages.

Serbo-Croatian was the most widely spoken of the languages used in Yugoslavia; it remains the dominant language in Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia and Hercegovina. Except for some differing word pairs that are easily understood, Serbian and Croatian are in effect one language; the Eastern Orthodox Serbs write it in the Cyrillic alphabet, and the Roman Catholic Croats write it in Latin script. During the 16th century, a rich poetic literature in Croatian was developed around Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast. The Serbo-Croatian literary language, formed in the early 19th century on the basis of certain widespread dialects, is close to the language of this early Dalmatian literature.

Slovenian is spoken in the Republic of Slovenia and in neighboring areas of Italy and Austria. This language began to differ from Serbo-Croatian between the 7th and 9th centuries. For several centuries thereafter the Slovenes lived under German and Italian domination and used Latin for church services. It was not until the Reformation, when the Scriptures were translated into Slovenian, that the language came into its own. Slovenian retains one archaic feature of Slavic, the dual number, and includes many German loanwords.

Macedonian is spoken in the Republic of Macedonia and in adjacent areas of Bulgaria. The youngest of the Slavic literary languages, it became official in 1944. It forms, with the Bulgarian Language, the Eastern group of the South Slavic branch of Slavic languages. Both languages are virtually devoid of declensions, and, unlike other Slavic languages, they have a definite article, and this occurs after the noun (for example, žena, “woman”; ženata, “the woman”). A significant admixture of Turkish elements is found in Macedonian and in Serbo-Croatian as well.