South Slavic languages

South Slavic languages is one of the three groups of Slavic languages (besides West and East Slavic). There are around 30 million speakers of these languages, mainly in the Balkans. The South Slavic languages are further subdivided into Eastern and Western groups.

Hungarian and Romanian now separate the South Slavic languages from West and East Slavic languages.

Classification of South Slavic languages:

Indo-European languages

Slavic languages (ca. 317 million speakers)

South Slavic languages (ca. 30 million)

Eastern group:

Bulgarian (ca. 9 million)

Macedonian (ca. 2 million)

Old Church Slavonic (ancient language used in traditional liturgy and religious texts)

Western group:

Bosnian (ca. 2 million)

Croatian (ca. 5 million)

Serbian (ca. 10 million)

Slovene (ca. 2 million)

Note that the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are still sometimes grouped as Serbo-Croatian, which would total ca. 17 million.