Shtokavian dialect

Shtokavian
štokavski dijalekt
Native to	Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Hungary
Native speakers	13 million (date missing)
Language family	Indo-European Balto-Slavic Slavic South Slavic Western Serbo-Croatian Shtokavian
Standard forms	Serbian Croatian Bosnian Montenegrin Standard Serbo-Croatian (defunct)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	shto1242
Linguasphere	53-AAA-ga to -gf & 53-AAA-gi (-gia to -gii)
Shtokavian subdialects (Pavle Ivić 1988)
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Shtokavian or Štokavian (/ʃtɒˈkɑːviən, -ˈkæ-/; Serbo-Croatian: štokavski / штокавски, pronounced [ʃtǒːkaʋskiː]) is the prestige dialect of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language, and the basis of its Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin standards. It is a part of the South Slavic dialect continuum. Its name comes from the form for the interrogatory pronoun for "what" in Western Shtokavian, što (it is šta in Eastern Shtokavian). This is in contrast to Kajkavian and Chakavian (kaj and ča also meaning "what").

Shtokavian is spoken in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, the major part of Croatia, and the southern part of Austria’s Burgenland. The primary subdivisions of Shtokavian are based on two principles: one is whether the subdialect is Old-Shtokavian or Neo-Shtokavian, and different accents according to the way the old Slavic phoneme jat has changed. Modern dialectology generally recognises seven Shtokavian subdialects.