Bosnian for Emergencies: Pharmacy, Doctor, Police

Every phrase in this article shares one problem: the moment you need it is the moment you cannot look it up. Your hands are busy, or your phone is the thing that was taken, or you are sitting in a pharmacy in Mostar at nine in the evening pointing at your own stomach. These are the sentences to put in your head in advance, in the order you are likely to need them.

The thing English speakers get wrong here is not vocabulary. It is register. English emergency speech is padded with apology: sorry to bother you, I was just wondering whether you might possibly be able to help. Bosnian does not do that. You say the imperative, you say what is wrong, and you say it plainly. Softening the sentence does not make you sound polite, it makes the person in front of you think the situation is not serious.

One useful piece of luck: Bosnian spelling is close to one letter, one sound, so the respellings below are more honest than they would be for Greek or Vietnamese. What a respelling cannot carry is the pitch accent, which rises and falls across the word and varies from speaker to speaker. Nobody in a pharmacy will care. Tap play on any phrase and copy what you hear.

There are two cries for help and they are not interchangeable. Upomoć is the open shout, the one you use when you are not addressing anybody in particular. Pomozite is an instruction to people who are present, and it is the plural form, which is also the polite form, so it works whether you are talking to one stranger or to a street.

Hitno is the word to recognise on signs and doors. Hitna pomoć, literally urgent help, is the ambulance service and also the name on the emergency entrance at a hospital. If you learn nothing else, learn to spot that pair of words.

Bosnia and Herzegovina keeps the old three digit services alongside the European 112. Police is 122, fire is 123, and the ambulance is 124. If you cannot remember which is which, 112 reaches an operator who will route you.

Bosnian does not say I have a pain in my head. It says the head hurts me. The body part is the subject and you are the object, so the pattern is fixed: boli me plus the thing that hurts. Once you have the frame, you only need the noun, and if the noun has gone you can use ovdje, meaning here, and point.

Krvarim is the one word on this page a respelling cannot fix. The r in the first syllable is a vowel in its own right, rolled and held, with no English sound behind it. Listen to it rather than reading it.

Three different buildings and people send you to the wrong one if you ask vaguely. An apoteka is the pharmacy. A dom zdravlja is the local public health centre, where you go for anything that is not an emergency and where a doctor will see you without an appointment at a desk. A bolnica is the hospital, and the part of it you want is marked hitna.

You will hear trebam doktora as well, and it is common in speech, but whether it is correct is argued about by people who care about such things. Treba mi doktor is the version nobody objects to, and the same frame carries everything else you want: treba mi, then the thing.

Pharmacies here are a first stop rather than a last one, and the pharmacist will ask what the symptom is before reaching for anything. Outside opening hours, look for the words dežurna apoteka: towns run a rota, and the pharmacy that is on duty overnight usually has the list taped to the door of every closed one.

Here is the grammar point that catches people out, and it catches them out in front of a police officer. The past tense in Bosnian agrees with the gender of the person speaking. A man says izgubio sam. A woman says izgubila sam. Learn only your own form and you will never have to think about it.

Theft works differently. Bosnian prefers an impersonal they, even when nobody knows who they were. Ukrali su mi, meaning they stole from me, is the natural sentence and it needs no gender agreement from you at all.

Swap the noun and the sentence still works: telefon, torba, pasoš, kofer. If you need a police report for an insurance claim, the phrase you want is the prijava, the written report, and you ask for a copy before you leave.

Do not open an emergency with izvinite, molim vas, da li biste možda mogli. It is grammatical, it is courteous, and it buys you four seconds of someone deciding you are lost rather than hurt. Lead with the problem. Molim vas is the one softener that belongs, and it belongs at the end, after the instruction: zovite hitnu, molim vas.

The other habit to drop is the reflexive English fine. If someone asks kako ste and you are not fine, do not say dobro sam. Say what hurts. People will ask the question out of ordinary courtesy and then take the answer literally.

And do not expect to be fussed over. A pharmacist or a nurse answering you flatly, without the apologetic cushioning an English speaker is used to, is not being cold. Brisk is the register of the room.

Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are mutually intelligible and every phrase here will be understood anywhere in the region. The words that change are exactly the ones on this page. Pharmacy is apoteka in Bosnia and Serbia and ljekarna in Croatia. Passport is pasoš in Bosnia and putovnica in Croatia. Medicine is lijek in Bosnian and Croatian and lek in Serbian, and the same split runs through dozens of words.

The bigger surface difference is the alphabet. Cyrillic is official in Republika Srpska, so signage in Banja Luka, Trebinje and elsewhere may be in Cyrillic, in Latin, or in both. The sign you most want to read looks like this.

On a call, lead with where you are. The operator needs a location before anything else, so give the town, the street and a landmark before you try to describe the problem, and expect to be interrupted and asked to repeat it. If your Bosnian runs out, say so plainly rather than apologising for it.

In writing, two things change. People drop the diacritics when they text, so hitna pomoć arrives as hitna pomoc and želim as zelim, and you should expect to read it that way rather than assume it is a different word. And anything that matters medically should be on paper, not in your head: write your allergies and your regular medication in Bosnian on a card and keep it in your wallet, because the pharmacist at the counter at eleven at night may not read English and you may not be the one doing the talking.

If you learn three things before you travel, make them pomozite, boli me plus one body part, and ukrali su mi. Add the correct past tense form for your own gender, izgubio or izgubila, because that is the one you will say to an official and the one you cannot bluff.

Say them flatly and say them first. The apology can come afterwards, if you still want to make it.