Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (BCS)

Until the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian languages were generally treated as variant forms of a single language, Serbo-Croatian. They are now treated as separate and distinct languages, a practice which is consistent with the language policies of the respective republics of the former Yugoslavia. Montenegro has now declared that its language is “Montenegrin or Crnogorski jezik”; however, the Library of Congress still treats Montenegrin as Serbian.

This chapter focuses on two topics: language notes and language codes.

For LC guidelines on how to distinguish between the Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian languages, see http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/serb.html

Language notes

In MARC records, a 546 language note is routinely supplied for Serbian language works (as stipulated by RDA 7.13.2.3 and 7.13.2.4). The reason for this practice is that the Serbian language can be written with either the Cyrillic or Latin alphabets; and it is important to indicate to readers which of these scripts is being used in the book in hand. However, these notes are not routinely supplied for works written in Croatian and Bosnian. Such a note for Serbian is normally formatted as below, if the note is only identifying Serbian as the language of an item:

Examples (in MARC format):

AACR2 RDA

546 In Serbian ‡b (Cyrillic). 546 Serbian; ‡b Cyrillic.

546 In Serbian ‡b (roman). 546 Serbian; ‡b Latin.

(see AACR2 1.7B2)

However, if the identification of the alphabet does not end the field, then the tagging for the subfield is left off, for example:

Examples (in MARC format) for both AACR2 and RDA:

546 Serbian Cyrillic, with summary in English.

546 Serbian (Cyrillic), with summary in English.

546 Serbian (Latin), with summary in English.

Language codes

For Serbian, use the language code srp, regardless of the alphabet.

For Croatian, use the language code hrv, regardless of the alphabet.

For Bosnian, use the language code bos, regardless of the alphabet.

A brief history of the codes for these languages may help in understanding codes found in older records. The original codes, established during the time of the unified Yugoslavia, were scc for Croatian or Serbian written in the Cyrillic alphabet and scr for Croatian or Serbian written in the Latin alphabet. At that time the languages were considered the same language, known as "Serbo-Croatian," and included the languages now known as Bosnian and Montenegrin.

After Yugoslavia was split up into independent states in 1991, Croatian and Serbian were recognized as two separate languages. At that time the scr language code was used for Croatian and the scc code was used for Serbian.

In 2008, the current codes were assigned to these two languages. In 2009, OCLC programmatically changed existing records with the language code scr to hrv and those with scc to srp. While this programmatic change worked well for items cataloged after 1991, items cataloged earlier may have language codes that do not reflect the language of the item cataloged. For example, Latin-alphabet Serbian language items cataloged prior to the breakup of Yugoslavia would have had an scr language code, and this would have been programmatically changed to hrv, instead of the correct srp. Catalogers encountering Serbian-language records where the language code does not match the language of the book being described are encouraged to change the code to the correct language.