Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian are separate standards. They are close, closer than most neighbouring languages in Europe, and what to call them is a subject people feel strongly about. We are not going to explain any of that to you, and we are not going to take a position on it. The practical instruction fits in one line: put all three on the list side by side, say nothing, and let each guest pick their own.
There is a lot that could be said here and almost none of it is useful to you on a Sunday morning. So here is the short version.
Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian are each their own entry on our list. They are not one language with three labels on our side, and they are not three unrelated languages either. Each arrives in its own standard, with its own habitual vocabulary and its own spelling conventions.
A person who speaks one of them will usually understand the other two perfectly well. That is true, and it is also not the point. Being handed something that is not what you would call your own language is a small thing that lands as a large thing, particularly for somebody who is already a guest in a room where everything else is unfamiliar.
So do not decide it for them, and do not make a moment of it either. No announcement from the front, no asking anyone which one they want in front of other people. The list is on the screen. They pick.
Offer all three. Say nothing. Let the person choose. Adding several languages costs you nothing extra, because language count is not a price lever here. Every pass carries as many languages as your guests need.
If you have ever wondered what the differences consist of, this is the honest short answer. It is not one big thing. It is a hundred small habitual ones.
Where one standard writes a short vowel, Croatian usually writes a longer sequence in the same word. Body, faith, milk and time all show it. Once you know to look for it you can see it in almost any Croatian sentence, and you can see it in the output further down this page.
When a word arrives from outside, Croatian tends to give it one ending and the neighbouring standards tend to give it another. To organise, to complicate, to inform: the root is shared, the tail is not, and it is one of the quickest ways a speaker places a text.
Croatian is more likely to carry on with a plain infinitive where a neighbouring standard uses a small linking word and a full clause. Both are understood everywhere. Neither is more correct. It simply sounds like home or slightly not.
Croatian is written in the Latin alphabet, with hooks and accents on five of its letters. Serbian is the one that is regularly written in two different alphabets, and that page explains what we send.
Three separate questions, and for Croatian all three answers are yes.
Spoken from the stage. A Croatian speaker can preach or give a testimony and the whole room follows in its own languages. One of the 81 languages that can be the source.
Read as captions. On the phone your guest already carries, or on the wall through MulingDisplay. One of 182 that can be read.
Heard as a voice. One of 81 that can be listened to rather than read, with a man's voice or a woman's voice.
Croatian sits in the list as hr, its own name Hrvatski. See all 183 languages.
Six Danish lines were run into every language at once, the way a real room runs, with the church setting on. Nothing has been edited since. Three of the Croatian ones are below.
The Danish Kødets gerninger er tydelige nok, siger han, og de står i modsætning til Åndens frugt.
Djela tijela sasvim su očita, kaže, i suprotstavljena su plodu Duha.
Word for word lands on: meat, at a butcher. Danish uses one short word for meat and for flesh, and so does English. What arrived is the word for the body in the sense Galatians means, and it is spelled with the long vowel sequence that marks it as Croatian rather than as one of the other two standards.
The Danish Lad os ikke gå over åen efter vand. Svaret står lige her i teksten.
Nemojmo ići daleko po ono što nam je nadohvat ruke. Odgovor je upravo ovdje u tekstu.
Word for word lands on: a stream and a bucket. The Danish saying means making something needlessly complicated. What arrived reaches for a different picture entirely, the one about something being within arm's reach, and then says plainly that the answer is right here in the text. Compare it with the Bosnian version of the same line, which came back much shorter.
The Danish Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
Milošću ste spašeni po vjeri, i to nije od vas, to je Božji dar.
Word for word lands on: mercy and rescued, which is not what a church means. What arrived keeps grace and saved as the theological pair, puts grace in the form that means by grace without needing a preposition, and again spells faith the Croatian way.
Produced cold, with no glossary and no preparation. Give it your outline beforehand with Context Enhancer and it starts the service already knowing your subject and your names.
For a very long time, churches along the Croatian coast celebrated in a Slavic language and printed their liturgical books in Glagolitic, an alphabet unlike anything else in Western Europe.
While the rest of the Western church worked in Latin, these congregations had permission to keep the Slavic vernacular tradition in the Roman rite, and they kept the alphabet that went with it. Glagolitic books were still being printed and used when most of Europe had never seen the script at all.
The alphabet in use today is the Latin one, standardised in the nineteenth century with hooks and accents added to five letters. But the older tradition is why Croatian religious language has a depth of its own, and why a Croatian believer can hear the difference between wording that belongs in a church and wording that belongs in a newspaper.
Bartol Kašić, a Croatian priest, produced a complete translation of the Bible into Croatian in the seventeenth century. It was not printed. It sat unpublished for centuries, and did not appear until our own lifetimes.
So the register Croatian Christians actually quote was set much later, by the modern standard translation, and by the liturgy people grew up hearing. That translation is where the settled words live: the word for grace that sounds scriptural, the word for the flesh that is not the word for meat, the phrasing of the prayers people know by heart.
This is the practical reason a general purpose translation disappoints a Croatian speaker in church. It produces correct Croatian in the register of a news report. What a believer is listening for is the other register, and they notice its absence immediately even if they could not name what is missing.
If your fellowship uses particular wording for names or terms, put it into Keywords and it is used exactly, every service.
Assume no warning, no volunteer who speaks the language, and no idea which of the three they would name. This still works.
Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian, together, before anybody arrives. That way nothing has to be decided at the door and nobody is put on the spot in front of other people.
They point a phone camera at the code and pick from the list themselves. Nothing to install, no account, no sign up. It takes about as long as finding a hymn number.
Keep a basket of cheap wired earphones by the door. Hand one over without a speech. The less this is made into an occasion, the more likely somebody is to come back.
Technically one would be understood. That is not the same as being right. Adding all three costs you nothing, takes one tap each, and removes the only awkward moment in the whole process, which is somebody having to accept a language that is not the one they would name.
No. Put all three on the list and let them choose it themselves on their own phone. Asking out loud turns a private thing into a public one, in a room full of people they have just met.
Whichever you choose to show. The wall display and the phones are separate: a guest reading on their own phone still gets their own choice regardless of what is on the wall. If your room is mostly Croatian speakers, put Croatian on the wall and leave the other two available on the phones.
Yes. Croatian can be the language coming off the stage as well as one arriving in the pews, so everybody else in the room receives it in their own language at the same moment.
Slovenian is a separate language, not a fourth standard of the same one, and a Slovenian speaker handed Croatian is genuinely working. It has its own entry and its own page.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket and one earphone.