Pričaj srpski da te ceo svet razume! 🇷🇸
From Eastern Europe to LA 🗣️ 📣 🇷🇸 🇭🇷 🇧🇦 🇲🇪
Pričaj srpski da te ceo svet razume!
“Speak Serbian so the whole world understands” is an old joke in this part of the world. A guest at the wedding we attended last summer in Zadar, Croatia cracked this one amidst trilingual confusion during a French-language toast. The language is, after all, Serbo-Croatian, and some people call it “Bosnian” or “Montenegrin.” It is one language with quite a few dialects and regional variations.
By English standards, it is grammatically complex with seven cases, plus masculine versus feminine nouns and adjective forms. I struggle with it, but then again, I only gained significant exposure to it as an adult with no prior study of Slavic dialects. Although this South Slavic tongue is only spoken by around 18 million people worldwide, it has been getting an unusual amount of air time in and around the greater Los Angeles area recently.
FLOTUS Notice
Back in January after the devastating Palisades Fire torched one of LA’s most elite coastal communities, Melania Trump paid a visit to an impacted neighborhood and found herself in conversation with an emotional Serbo-Croatian speaker. It was a brief chat, but in the course of it, the unidentified woman stated “Ja sam došla kad imala sam deset godina” (I arrived when I was ten-years old). Some audible pieces of this chat included:
Melania: “Gde ste živeli?” (“Where do you live?”)
Anon: “Ovaj, jedak blok dole. Ovaj je moj muž.” (“Here, one block down. This is my husband.”)
Melania: Sve je popunjeno? (“All is alright?”)
Anon: “Sve.” (“(Yes), all.)
Melanie: “Imate dece?” (“Do you have children?”)
Anon: “Da, imamo dva dečaka.” (“Yes, we have two boys.”)
Native speakers were wowed to be able to understand a conversation between the American president’s wife and a random resident of one of LA’s platinum communities. While Melania’s native language is Slovenian, a mutually intelligible cousin of Serbian, she seems to understand Serbo-Croatian since she was educated in Slovenia when it was a part of Yugoslavia. So while Melania Trump (née Melanija Knavs) usually keeps a low profile, her language abilities brought comfort to a former child immigrant whose new world home narrowly escaped the flames.
Court Communication
Across town, two more announcements reverberated around the world, specifically the sporting world. The first was the shocking trade of Slovenian-Serbian basketball star Luka Dončić from the Dallas Mavericks to the Los Angeles Lakers, and the second was the trade of Serbia’s national team star Bogdan Bogdanović from the Atlanta Hawks to the LA Clippers. Like his compatriot Melania, Luka speaks Slovenian and Serbian (his mother is Slovenian and his father is Serbian-Slovenian), while Bogdan is a native Serbian speaker from his country’s capital.
The former Yugoslavia and its diaspora have long been powerful forces on the international sports scene, with many Balkan players rising to prominence in the NBA. While Dallas fans dried their eyes, LA readied to welcome Luka #77 to his new West Coast home. Luka’s basketball career kicked off with Olimpija Ljubljana, where his father Saša Dončić trained young players like the Dragić brothers, Goran and Zoran.
At 13, he was picked up by Real Madrid’s youth wing, so Spain became his second home and Spanish his third language. By 18, he supported Goran Dragić in leading Slovenia to victory at the 2017 FIBA EuroBasket championships. Slovenia beat Team Serbia by 8 points, despite the prowess of Serbia’s shooting guard, Bogdan Bogdanović. The game ended with mutual respect, thanks for the integrity of the players and the close ties between the two teams- a good number of Team Slovenia had Serbian heritage, and at the end, they were all able to congratulate one another in the same (or similar!) language(s). 🗣️
Luka spent his teen years growing into the face of European basketball, becoming the youngest ever EuroLeague MVP for the 2017-2018 season. After his 19th birthday, the NBA came knocking while rumors rooted in old country drama bounced around the 2018 draft season. As Luka was drafted to the Dallas Mavericks, speculation arose surrounding why (then) Sacramento Kings general manager Vlade Divac failed to snap up the incoming EuroLeague prodigy. Divac, a giant of Yugoslav basketball and former Laker, denied rumors that he passed on Luka due to some 1980s personality conflicts with Saša, Luka’s father, another titan of Balkan basketball.
Strangely enough, the Phoenix Suns also passed on Luka during that draft season, despite Phoenix’s coach at the time being Igor Kokoškov, a Serbian national who coached Luka to FIBA victory on Slovenia’s national team a year earlier. Speaking the same language does not always guarantee alignment, but NBA politics is complex! Flashing forward to 2025, Luka started off his tenure as an Angeleno by donating $500,000 to children’s recreational facilities that had been damaged during the January fires via his personal foundation!
That 2017 match between Slovenia and Serbia ended with a Serbian loss, but throughout the match shooting guard Bogdan Bogdanović kept the game spicy. On the club front, Bogdan started off with hometown KK Partizan before moving to Istanbul’s Fenerbahçe, where he was coached by a compatriot, Željko Obradović. He burgeoned under the tutelage of the hot-headed Obradović, the so-called “Mourinho of Basketball,” a coach infamous for his on-court outbursts laced with plenty of Serbian profanity. By the time he represented Serbia at FIBA 2017, Bogdanović was a NBA fixture with the Sacramento Kings, traded from the Phoenix Suns to the Kings in 2017.
COVID put the NBA on standstill, but by the end of 2020, Bogdan was traded to the Atlanta Hawks for $72 million. He narrowly missed being coached by Kokoškov at the Suns, but trained under him in Sacramento and again with the Hawks when Kokoškov made the move to Atlanta as assistant coach in 2023. Now that he is on the Clippers, he will be playing alongside a fellow native language speaker, the Bosnian-born Croatian center, Ivica Zubac.
Solidarity
On another random note, as protests across Serbia move forward with their demands for transparency in government contracts, Serbian-Australian actress Bojana Novaković was spotted in Venice Beach with a group of local expats flashing supportive signage. Bojana, who appeared in I, Tonya (2017) and Chicago P.D. (2024), splits her time between Sydney, LA, New York, and Belgrade. She has long been a critic of mining giant Rio Tinto’s activities in Australia and their planned lithium/jadarite excavations in Serbia, becoming a vocal supporter of the student-led protests that sweeping the country in the ‘24/25 winter season.
Back in the early ‘90s, Sasha and his family got to know Vlade Divac as he launched his NBA career with the Lakers. Meanwhile, over in newly independent Slovenia, now-FLOTUS Melanija Knavs starred in a fashion campaign ad where she played a newly elected female leader, strutting up to take the oath of office in a designer pantsuit. Today, Serbian (Serbo-Croatian) is a popular language for cursing amongst American NBA players who have picked up swear words from their expatriate teammates and coaches. I might be struggling to understand this language as an LA transplant here in Serbia, but it seems that the language is well ahead of me back on the American West Coast!
Oh wow Srpski?! Close to русский
Such pleasant easy flowing explanatory article that I adores from the first letter till the end. I speak Russian as my third language and it appears I can understand at least half, if not more of the Serb sentences. I would love to vise Serbia with my Russian wife. I am sure they would love us, a Russian and Palestinian.