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The Serbian language is one of the standard versions of the Štokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and by Serbs everywhere. The former standard was known as Serbo-Croatian language, now split into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian standards.

The Serbian alphabet is very consistent: one letter per sound with an insignificant number of exceptions. This phonetic principle is represented in the saying: "Write as you speak and read as it is written", the principle used by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić when reforming the Cyrillic spelling of Serbian in the 19th century.

Another rare feature of Serbian language is the presence of two alphabets: Cyrillic and Latin. The two alphabets are almost equivalent; the only difference is in the glyphs used. This is due to historical reasons; Serbian once being a part of the Serbo-Croat unification brought Latinic usage into Serbia. Cyrillic is for nationalists (low education) and Latinic for more educated people. Most Serbians dont use Cyrillic any more, Serbia today is moving closer to Europe.

Standard Serbian is based on Štokavian dialect, and it accepts both ekavian (spoken mostly in Serbia) and ijekavian (spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia) pronunciation. Features of Torlakian dialect, spoken in southern Serbia, are not accepted as literary standard, with few exceptions.

Alphabets

The following compares Serbian Cyrillic script (Српска Ћирилица) or Azbuka (Aзбука) with the Serbian Latin script (Srpska Latinica) or Abeceda.

Notes

• Some people do not consider the Latin alphabet as Serbian, but as Croatian. The Latin alphabet was not in official use in Serbia before the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed (1918); however Serbs living in Austro-Hungary (Vojvodina, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina) have been using the Latin alphabet for centuries. After WW II the communists insisted the Latin alphabet to be used in Serbia, taking Cyrillic typing machines out of state buildings and almost banning Cyrillic.
• The letters Lj, Nj and Dž are represented by two characters in the Latin alphabet and are always written together even in top-down text). They are also sorted together (i.e. ljubav comes after lopta).
• Cyrillic is considered more precise because there is no ambiguity involved in reading Lj, Nj and Dž. For example, both Cyrillic "инјекција" (mathematical injection or medical injection) and "његов" (his) are written with "nj" in Latin form. Thus, transliteration of Cyrillic text to Latin is straightforward but causes loss of information that makes it harder to perform the inverse.
• The sort order of the two alphabets is different.

Cyrillic: А Б В Г Д Ђ Е Ж З И Ј К Л Љ М Н Њ О П Р С Т Ћ У Ф Х Ц Ч Џ Ш

Roman: A B C Č Ć D Dž Đ E F G H I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S Š T U V Z Ž

• Many e-mail and even web documents written in Serbian use basic ASCII, where Serbian Latin letters that use diacritics (Ž Ć Č Š) are replaced with the base, undiacritised forms (Z C C S), letter Đ is replaced with Dj, and Dž with Dz. The original words are then recognized from the context. This is not an official alphabet, and is considered a bad practice, but there are some documents in Serbian that use this simplified alphabet. This is common practice in other languages that use letters with diacritics.

Phonology

Vowels

The Serbian vowel system is simple, with only five vowels. All vowels are monophthongs. The oral vowels are as follows:

Consonants

The consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants. As in English, voicedness is phonemic, but aspiration is not.

In consonant clusters all consonants are either voiced or voiceless. All the consonants are voiced (if the last consonant is normally voiced) or voiceless (if the last consonant is normally voiceless). This rule does not apply to approximants — a consonant cluster may contain voiced approximants and voiceless consonants; as well as to foreign words (Washington would be transcribed as VašinGton/ВашинГтон), personal names and when consonants are not inside of one syllable.

R can be syllabic, playing the role of a vowel in certain words (occasionally, it can even have a long accent). For example, the tongue-twister na vrh brda vrba mrda involves four words with syllabic r. A similar feature exists in Czech, Slovak and Macedonian. Very rarely, l can be syllabic (in the name for the river "Vltava", 'l' is syllabic) as well as lj, m, n and nj in jargon.

Morphology

Cases

There are seven cases in Serbian: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental and locative, although locative and dative nearly always have the same form. This, in concert with a non-fixed word-order, can make Serbian difficult to learn for speakers of languages without a strong case system. In Serbian, the sentence "Anna loves Philip" can therefore variously be expressed thus:

• Ana voli Filipa
• Ana Filipa voli
• Voli Ana Filipa
• Voli Filipa Ana
• Filipa Ana voli
• Filipa voli Ana

Serbian literature

Main article: Serbian literature

Serbian literature emerged in the Middle Ages, and included such works as Miroslavljevo jevanđelje (The Gospel of Miroslav) in 1192 and Dušanov zakonik (Dušan's Code) in 1349. Little secular mediæval literature has been preserved, but what there is shows that it was in accord with its time; for example, Serbian Alexandride, a book about Alexander the Great, and a translation of Tristan and Iseult into Serbian.

In the mid-15th century, Serbia was conquered by the Ottoman Empire and, for the next 400 years there was no opportunity for the creation of secular written literature. However, some of the greatest literary works in Serbian come from this time, in the form of oral literature, the most notable form being Serbian epic poetry. It is known that Goethe learned the Serbian language in order to read Serbian epic poetry in the original. Written literature was produced only for religious use in churches and monasteries, and held to Old Church Slavonic. By the end of the 18th century, the written literature had become estranged from the spoken language. In the second half of the 18th century, the new language appeared, called Slavonic-Serbian. In the early 19th century, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, following the work of Sava Mrkalj, reformed the Cyrillic alphabet by introducing the phonetic principle, as well as promoting the spoken language of the people as a literary norm.

The first printed book in Serbian, Oktoih was produced in Cetinje in 1494, only 40 years after Gutenberg's invention of movable type.

Demographics

Figures of speakers according to countries:

• Serbia: 6,770,000
  • Vojvodina: 1,557,020 (2002)
  • Central Serbia: 5,063,679 (2002)
  • Kosovo: 150,000
• Montenegro: 401,382 (2003)
• Bosnia-Herzegovina: 1,500,000
• USA: around 500,000
• Canada: 55,545 (2001 census, 40,580 of that in Ontario)
• Croatia: 44,629 (2001)
• Republic of Macedonia: 33,315 (2001)
• Romania: 20,377 (2001)
• Australia: 50,000 (2001)

Trivia

Two Serbian words that are used in many of the world's languages are vampire and slivovitz (though the etymology and origin of the word vampire is disputed ).

Differences to similar languages

Main article: Differences in official languages in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia

See also

• Common phrases in Serbian
• Serbian proverbs
• Serbian tongue-twisters
• Famous non-Serbs who were speaking or learning the language
• Šatrovački (slang form)
• Romano-Serbian language (mix with Romany)
• Swadesh list of Serbo-Croatian words

Online dictionaries

• Vokabular, online serbian-serbian dictionary, cyrillic and latin
• Serbian (Latin Script) Dictionary from Webster's Dictionary
• Metak - Serbian-English dictionary
• Serbian-Bulgarian dictionary

External links

• Standard language as an instrument of culture and the product of national history — an article by pre-eminent linguist Pavle Ivić
• Serbian School Learn Serbian online for free.
• Serbian Language and Culture Workshop *Serbian vocabulary learning tool

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• Serbian language
• South Slavic languages
• Languages of Serbia
• Languages of Montenegro
• Languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Languages of Vojvodina
• Languages of Kosovo
• Languages of Hungary
• Languages of Romania
• Languages of the Republic of Macedonia