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Bosnian medical interpreters

Real-time Bosnian medical interpretation for healthcare teams, on phones, tablets, and computers.

107,000 people in the U.S. speak Bosnian at home.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.

Bosnian speakers by state
StateSpeakers
Missouri11,910
Iowa7,135
Kentucky3,780
Vermont893
Idaho859
North Dakota685

State counts reflect the 15 most reported non-English languages in each state’s ACS table. States where Bosnian falls outside the top 15 are shown without shading; the national total includes every state.

41,280

speakers of Bosnian speak English less than “very well”: the federal threshold for needing language assistance.

39%

of Bosnian speakers in the U.S. meet that limited-English definition.

11,910

people speak Bosnian at home in Missouri alone.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.

Meet Opalite.

Real-time AI medical interpretation in 150+ languages and dialects, connecting providers and patients in seconds.

  • Works on the devices care teams already carry: phones, tablets, computers, and telehealth platforms
  • Integrates with all EHRs
  • Built for HIPAA-compliant healthcare
  • SOC 2 Type II attested security controls

What to know when interpreting Bosnian

Every language has grammar that an interpreter must handle correctly. These are the Bosnian features that the fewest other languages in the world share, according to the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS).

Indo-European · Slavic · Eurasia

2.9%

of the world’s languages share this trait

Bosnian can put its question word at the start or the end of a sentence, so an interpreter must listen through to the last word before knowing whether it was a question.

WALS 92A · Position of Polar Question Particles · In either of two positions

4.1%

of the world’s languages share this trait

Bosnian commands like “come” or “go” can take a completely different word from the everyday verb, so an interpreter must know both forms to relay an instruction correctly.

WALS 79B · Suppletion in Imperatives and Hortatives · A regular and a suppletive form alternate

4.6%

of the world’s languages share this trait

Bosnian nouns change their endings across five cases to show their role in the sentence, so an interpreter reads the ending, not the word order, to tell who did what to whom.

WALS 49A · Number of Cases · 5 cases

How Bosnian is structured

Word ordersubject, object and verb
SVO
Adpositionsprepositions or postpositions
Prepositions
Adjectivebefore or after the noun
Adjective-Noun
Demonstrativethis and that, before or after
Demonstrative-Noun
Numeralnumber before or after the noun
Numeral-Noun
Genitivepossessor before or after
No dominant order
Relative clausebefore or after the noun
Not coded
Morphologyprefixing or suffixing
Strongly suffixing
Tonewhether pitch changes meaning
Not coded
Casesnumber of noun cases
5 cases
Gendersnumber of noun genders
Not coded
Classifierscounting words for nouns
Not coded

Source: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. WALS Online, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Bosnian entry: wals.info SCR. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Values are reproduced as WALS codes them; each links to its datapoint. The clinical readings are Opalite’s own inferences and are not part of WALS.

FAQs about Bosnian medical interpreters

Three states hold 21% of the nation’s Bosnian speakers, and Bosnian ranks in the published top-15 language tables of 6 states.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2017-2021 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.

Opalite uses the same underlying interpretation techniques for Bosnian as it does for Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese. In Opalite’s published validation study, those three languages were evaluated in clinical conversations, with over 90% fewer errors than certified medical interpreters across the conversations studied.

States where Bosnian is a top 15 non-English language

All states

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