Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian are all varieties of a South Slavic dialect continuum — mutually intelligible to a very high degree — historically grouped under the umbrella term Serbo-Croatian. In Bosnia and Herzegovina all three are officially recognised co-equal languages under the 1995 Dayton Agreement, reflecting the country's three constituent peoples: Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats. Bosnian is primarily written in the Latin alphabet by Bosniaks, though the Cyrillic script is also officially recognised. The Bosnian variety is distinguished by a slightly higher number of loanwords from Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian — a legacy of nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule (1463–1878). These oriental loanwords (orientalizmi) give Bosnian a distinctive flavour absent from standard Croatian or Serbian.
