Novi Sad in the context of "Pannonian Basin"

Banat, Bačka, and Baranya (Serbo-Croatian: Banat, Bačka i Baranja / Банат, Бачка и Барања) was a province of the Kingdom of Serbia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes between November 1918 and 1922. It included the geographical regions of Banat, Bačka, and Baranya and its administrative center was Novi Sad. They were later separated from the country to become SAP Vojvodina in 1945 with the creation of Federal Yugoslavia; smaller parts of Baranya were incorporated into Croatia or ceded to Kingdom of Hungary, while a portion of Banat was ceded to Kingdom of Romania.

Vojvodina (Serbian: Војводина, IPA: [vǒjvodina], VOY-və-DEE-nə), officially the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (Serbian: Аутономна Покрајина Војводина, romanized: Autonomna Pokrajina Vojvodina), is an autonomous province in northern Serbia. It encompasses the historical and geographical regions of Bačka, Banat, Syrmia, and northernmost part of Mačva, lying to the north of the national capital Belgrade and the Sava and Danube rivers. Vojvodina has 1.7 million inhabitants, about a quarter of the country's population, and its administrative centre, Novi Sad, is the second largest city in Serbia.

The Pannonian Basin, with the term Carpathian Basin being sometimes preferred in Hungarian literature, is a large, mainly lowland area in southeastern Central Europe, briefly described as a sedimentary basin. Under the geopolitically changed conditions created by World War I and the ensuing Treaty of Trianon, the geomorphological term Pannonian Plain was also used for roughly the same region, referring to the lowlands in the area occupied by the Pannonian Sea during the Pliocene. However, Hungarian geographers consider the term "Pannonian Plain" not only unhistorical but also topographically highly erroneous. Regarding the name as such, they are arguing in terms of ancient history, namely that the northern and eastern boundary line of the namesake Roman province of Pannonia was formed by the River Danube, thus the Great Hungarian Plain was not part of the original Pannonia province.

Cultural mosaic (French: "la mosaïque culturelle") is a metaphor for a society composed of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and cultural groups that are encouraged to maintain their unique identities while coexisting. The idea of a cultural mosaic is intended to suggest a form of multiculturalism as seen in Canada, that differs from other systems such as the melting pot, which is often used to describe nations like the United States' assimilation.

Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother tongue, but many read and write in one language. Being multilingual is advantageous for people wanting to participate in trade, globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages has become increasingly possible. People who speak several languages are also called polyglots.

Multilingual speakers have acquired and maintained at least one language during childhood, the so-called first language (L1). The first language (sometimes also referred to as the mother tongue) is usually acquired without formal education, by mechanisms about which scholars disagree. Children acquiring two languages natively from these early years are called simultaneous bilinguals. It is common for young simultaneous bilinguals to be more proficient in one language than the other.

Bačka (Serbian: Бачка, pronounced [bâːtʃkaː]) or Bácska (pronounced [ˈbaːtʃkɒ]), is a geographical and historical area within the Pannonian Plain bordered by the river Danube to the west and south, and by the river Tisza to the east. It is divided between Serbia and Hungary. Most of the area is located within the Vojvodina region in Serbia and Novi Sad, the administrative center of Vojvodina, lies on the border between Bačka and Syrmia. The smaller northern part of the geographical area is located within Bács-Kiskun County in Hungary.

The Socialist Autonomous Province of Vojvodina was one of the two autonomous provinces of the Socialist Republic of Serbia within Yugoslavia (the other being Kosovo), between 1945 and 1990. The province is the direct predecessor to the modern-day Serbian Autonomous Province of Vojvodina.

The province was formally created in 1945 in the aftermath of the World War II in Yugoslavia, as the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina. In 1968, it was granted a higher level of political autonomy, and the adjective Socialist was added to its official name. In 1990, after the constitutional reform influenced by what is known as the anti-bureaucratic revolution, its autonomy was reduced to the pre-1968 level, and the term Socialist was dropped from its name. It was encompassing regions of Srem, Banat and Bačka, with capital in Novi Sad.

The romanization of Serbian is the representation of the Serbian language using the Latin script. Serbian is written in two alphabets; Serbian Cyrillic, a variation of the Cyrillic script, and Gaj's Latin alphabet, or latinica, a variation of the Latin script. Both are widely used in Serbia. The Serbian language is thus an example of digraphia.

The two alphabets are almost directly and completely interchangeable. Romanization can be done with no errors, but, due to the use of digraphs in the Latin script (due to letters "nj" (њ), "lj" (љ), and "dž" (џ)), knowledge of Serbian is sometimes required to do proper transliteration from Latin back to Cyrillic. Standard Serbian currently uses both alphabets. A survey from 2014 showed that 47% of the Serbian population favors the Latin alphabet whereas 36% favors Cyrillic; the remaining 17% has no preference.