Serbo-Croatian
The Balkan region is marked out by Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and Greece, and also marginally by Romania.
For centuries the Balkan region has been a place where followers of the Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church and Islam have lived side by side, and where Hungarian, Austrian, Russian and Turkish influences have long affected the a distinctive culture of the local people. This area has suffered a great deal of misery during wartime.
South Slavic languages are further divided into the eastern and western branches. The western branch, namely Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian, are variants of Serbo-Croatian.
The Latin or Cyrillic script?
It is interesting how the written form of the language has developed. As in Great Moravia, the form of the script was closely associated with the adoption of Christianity in the early Middle Ages. While the Serbs clung to the eastern form of Christianity and with it the Cyrillic alphabet, the Croats tended towards Rome and started using the Latin script. The Bosnians, who were the first to use the Serbian and then the Croatian alphabet, converted to Islam during the Ottoman Empire and adopted the Arabic script (arabica). Now once again only the Latin and Cyrillic scripts are used. The Serbs also started to use the Croatian alphabet, although Cyrillic is more commonly used in Serbian texts.
TRANSLATIONS TO AND FROM – Serbo-Croatian
Slovenian
Slovenian is a South Slavic language. It is also one of the local languages used in Italy and Austria.
TRANSLATIONS TO AND FROM – Slovenian
Greek
Greek is an Indo-European language used mainly in Greece, Cyprus and parts of Turkey.
Greek forms a separate evolutionary branch of the Indo-European family of languages and, after Aramaic and Chinese, is the language with the longest literary tradition. After the division and fall of the Western Roman Empire (in 476) Greek became the only official language of the Eastern Empire and slowly replaced Latin.
TRANSLATIONS TO AND FROM – Greek