Serbian language

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 is known as Serbo-Croatian language, now split into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian standards.

The Serbian ortography 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 Latin usage into Serbia. It is fair to say that today, the Latin alphabet remains the more popular among the younger generations.

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.

Cyrillic	Latin		Cyrillic	Latin		А	A	Н	N		Б	B	Њ	Nj		В	V	О	O		Г	G	П	P		Д	D	Р	R		Ђ	Đ	С	S		Е	E	Т	T		Ж	Ž	Ћ	Ć		З	Z	У	U		И	I	Ф	F		Ј	J	Х	H		К	K	Ц	C		Л	L	Ч	Č		Љ	Lj	Џ	Dž		М	M	Ш	Š

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, after WW II the communists insisted the Latin alphabet 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.

Phonetics

Vowels

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

Latin script	Cyrillic script	Description	English approximation
a	а	open front unrounded	father
i	и	close front unrounded	seek
e	е	open-mid front unrounded	ten
o	о	open-mid back rounded	caught (British)
u	у	closed back rounded	boom

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.

Latin script	Cyrillic script	Description	English approximation
trill
r	р	alveolar trill	rolled r as in Spanish carro
approximants
v	в	labiodental approximant	vase
j	ј	palatal approximant	yes
laterals
l	л	lateral alveolar approximant	lock
lj	љ	palatal lateral approximant	paella (Spanish)
nasals
m	м	bilabial nasal	man
n	н	alveolar nasal	not
nj	њ	palatal nasal	canyon
fricatives
f	ф	voiceless labiodental fricative	face
s	с	voiceless alveolar fricative	some
z	з	voiced alveolar fricative	zero
š	ш	voiceless postalveolar fricative	sheer
ž	ж	voiced postalveolar fricative	vision
h	х	voiceless velar fricative	loch
affricates
c	ц	voiceless alveolar affricate	pots
dž	џ	voiced postalveolar affricate	dodge
č	ч	voiceless postalveolar affricate	chair
đ	ђ	voiced alveolo-palatal affricate	schedule
ć	ћ	voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate	nature
plosives
b	б	voiced bilabial plosive	abuse
p	п	voiceless bilabial plosive	top
d	д	voiced alveolar plosive	dog
t	т	voiceless alveolar plosive	talk
g	г	voiced velar plosive	god
k	к	voiceless velar plosive	duck

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.

Phonology

While the basic sound system is fairly simple, Serbian phonology is very complicated: there are numerous interactions between voices at morpheme boundaries which cause sound changes, with numerous exceptions. The changes include:

Iotation (historic)
Two types of palatalization ( still active):
- First, involving shift of velar consonants k, g and h into postalveolar č, ž and š in front of front vowels e and i,
- Second (aka sibilarization), involving shift of k, g and h into alveolar c, z and s in front of e and i
Voicing and Devoicing assimilation
Assimilation by place of articulation
Elision in complex consonant clusters
L→O shift, where final and pre-consonant L morphed into O (historic)
"Labile A", referring to sound "a" occuring only nominative and genitive plural of suffixes -ak and -ac: točak (wheel) (N) → točka (G) → točku (D) etc.

Voicing/devoicing

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.

Accentuation

With the fairly irregular accentuation, the vowels obtain different lengths and qualities (two of each), which makes the Serbian almost impossible to coherently learn as a foreign language in terms of vowel pronunciation (the complex case system aside). Some general rules accentuation rules do exist, but the often don't apply in colloquial speech as they are based on rural dialects of Western Serbia and Eastern Herzegovina.

Morphology

Cases

There are seven cases in Serbian: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental and locative, since locative and dative have the same form, but have been traditionally separated, morpohologically the number of cases is six. This, in concert with a non-fixed word-order, can make Serbian difficult to learn for speakers of languages without a strong case system.

Syntax

The default word order is Subject-Verb-Object, as in the first sentence above. Nevertheless, its system of declension and conjugation have allowed Serbian to be a free word order language, and as such it is often cited by Chomsky and other generative syntacticians.

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

However, the reordering shifts the focus of presentation, usually towards the first word—thus, the third and fourth sentence stress that Ana really loves Philip (rather than being indifferent), while fifth and sixth stress that it is Philip whom Ana likes (not somebody else). However, similar effects can be achieved by intonation on the word, as in English. Furthermore, some deviations from the SVO order are considered archaic and/or poetic.

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 ^*, and both words are common in many Slavic languages).

Differences to similar languages

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

Online dictionaries

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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