International Day of Mother Tongue was marked by visit of representatives of the Language Institute in Bijelo Polje. The Bosniak National Council in Montenegro, in cooperation with the Language Institute, organized the Public Lecture “Bosnian Language in the Context of International Mother Language Day”. The lecture was held at the Cultural Center starting at 19.00. Representatives of the Institute were dr. sc. Alen Kalajdžija, director of the Institute, who spoke about literary language production in the Bosnian language through the centuries. He noted that, except in the Austro-Hungarian period, also in the Ottoman period Bosnian was officially in education, even beyond the borders of today’s BiH, for example, in Novi Pazar, Sjenica and Nikšić. Finally, he emphasized today’s presence of the Bosnian in the region: Macedonia, Kosovo, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro, where the Institute has provided significant support. The writer Hadžem Hajdarević said that the attitude of Bosniaks towards his mother tongue is conditioned by the void in memory and oblivion, and when you have ignorance, it is easy to spread confusion. Dr. sc. Jasmin Hodžić spoke about the relationship of individual languages in the Balkans towards Serbian-Croatian as a former common language and the criterion of understandability among our individual languages. He noted that Bosnian as a special language was nurtured through the centuries, except in the period between 1918 and 1960s, when it began to return to the social scene again. The director of the Institute donated to the Bosniak National Council several publications of the Language Institute.

We would like to thank the organizers on the invitation and guests of the evening on the response, in the hope that the lectures answered the existing issues related to the Bosnian language, its status and gave guidelines for further development.