Serbian српски језик srpski jezik |
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Pronunciation: | [ˈsr̩pskiː] | |
Spoken in: | See below under "Official status", besides that in Croatia and as an immigrant's language spread over Central and Western Europe, as well as Northern America | |
Region: | Central Europe, Southern Europe | |
Total speakers: | Over 12 Million | |
Ranking: | Around 63 | |
Language family: | Indo-European Balto-Slavic South Slavic Western South Slavic Serbian |
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Writing system: | Cyrillic (Serbian variant) Latin (Serbian variant) |
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Official status | ||
Official language in: | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Recognized minority language in: |
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Regulated by: | Board for Standardization of Serbian | |
Language codes | ||
ISO 639-1: | sr | |
ISO 639-2: | srp | |
ISO 639-3: | srp | |
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Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. |
The Serbian language (Serbian: српски језик; srpski jezik) is a South Slavic language, spoken chiefly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and in the Serbian diaspora. Standard Serbian is based on Shtokavian dialect, like modern Croatian and Bosniak (which was formerly known as Serbo-Croatian), with which it is mutually intelligible, and was previously unified with under the standard known as Serbo-Croatian. It counts among official (and minority) languages of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, Romania, Republic of Macedonia and Hungary.
Two alphabets are used to write Serbian: a variation on the Cyrillic alphabet, devised by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, and a variation on the Latin alphabet, devised by Ljudevit Gaj.
Serbian orthography is very consistent: approximation of the principle "one letter per sound". This principle is represented by Adelung's saying, "Write as you speak and read as it is written", the principle used by Vuk Karadžić when reforming the Cyrillic orthography of Serbian in the 19th century.
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Serbian can be written in two different alphabets: Serbian Cyrillic script (ћирилица) and the Serbian Latin (latinica). Both were promoted in Yugoslavia. The Cyrillic script is official under the 2006 Constitution of Serbia, but the Latin script continues to gain ground as a result of its popularity among the business community and urban population. Before 1945 Serbs in Serbia did not officialy use the Latin alphabet [1].
Cyrillic | Latin | Cyrillic | Latin | |
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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 |
The sort order of the two alphabets is different.
The Cyrillic letters <Љ>, <Њ> and <Џ> are represented by digraphs in the Latin alphabet. In digraphs, letters are always written together - even in top-down text - and are also sorted as one letter (e.g. ljubav, 'love', comes after lopta, 'ball'). The present Cyrillic script, having been devised for the language itself, is 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, automatic transliteration of Cyrillic text to Latin is straightforward, but automatic transliteration of Latin text to Cyrillic requires additional heuristic rules.
South Slavic languages and dialects |
Western South Slavic |
Croatian Western Štokavian Čakavian · Kajkavian Burgenland · Molise |
Serbian Eastern Štokavian Slavoserbian Romano-Serbian · Užice |
Bosnian Central Štokavian |
Slovene dialects |
Differences between standard Croatian / Serbian / Bosnian |
Deprecated or non-ISO
Serbo-Croatian · Bunjevacrecognized languages Montenegrin · Šokac |
Eastern South Slavic |
Church Slavonic (Old) |
Bulgarian Banat · Greek Slavic Shopski · Meshterski · more |
Macedonian Dialects Aegean Macedonian Spoken Macedonian Standard Macedonian |
Transitional dialects |
Eastern-Central Torlak dialects · Našinski |
Western-Central Kajkavian |
Alphabets |
Modern Gaj's Latin1 · Serbian Cyrillic Macedonian Cyrillic Bulgarian Cyrillic Slovene |
Historical Bohoričica · Dajnčica · Metelčica Arebica · Bosnian Cyrillic Glagolitic · Early Cyrillic |
1 Includes Banat Bulgarian alphabet. |
The Serbian vowel system is simple, with only five vowels. All vowels are monophthongs. The vowels are as follows:[6]
Latin script | Cyrillic script | IPA | Description | English approximation |
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i | и | /i/ | close front unrounded | seek |
e | е | /e/ | (open-)mid front unrounded | net |
a | а | /a/ | open central unrounded | father |
o | о | /o/ | (open-)mid back rounded | caught (British) |
u | у | /u/ | closed back rounded | boom |
The consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants. Voicing is phonemic, but aspiration is not. The consonant phoneme table for Serbian is as follows (corresponding Latin letters are below the IPA symbols)
Consonant Phonemes of Serbian | ||||||||||||||
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Bilabial | Labio- Dental |
Dental | Alveolar | Post- Alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | ||||||||
Nasal | /m/ M |
/n/ N |
/ɲ/ Nj |
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Plosive | /p/ P |
/b/ B |
/t/ T |
/d/ D |
/k/ K |
/g/ G |
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Affricate | /ts/ C |
/tʃ/ Č |
/dʒ/ Dž |
/tɕ/ Ć |
/dʑ/ Đ |
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Fricative | /f/ F |
/s/ S |
/z/ Z |
/ʃ/ Š |
/ʒ/ Ž |
/x/ H |
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Approximant | /ʋ/ [a] V |
/j/ J |
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Trill | /r/ R |
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Lateral | /l/ L |
/ʎ/ Lj |
/r/ can be syllabic, playing the role of a vowel in certain words (it can even have a long accent). For example, the tongue-twister na vrh brda vrba mrda involves four words with syllabic /r̩/. A similar feature exists in Czech, Slovak, Macedonian and many other languages. In some vernaculars /l/ can be syllabic as well. However, in the standard language, it appears only in loanwords as in the name for the Czech river Vltava for instance, or debakl (дебакл), monokl (монокл) and bicikl (бицикл).
In Serbian, the phonemes /tʃ/, /tɕ/, /dʒ/, and /dʑ/ (in contrast to Croatian and Bosnian vernaculars) have an independent phonetic realization in most vernaculars.[8]
While the basic sound system is fairly simple, Serbian phonology is very complicated: there are numerous interactions (sandhi rules) between voices at morpheme boundaries which cause sound changes, with numerous exceptions. The changes include:
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.
Serbian has an extended system of accentuation. From the phonological point of view it has four accents which are divided into two groups according to their quality:
However, their realization varies according to vernacular. That is why Daničić, Budmani, Matešić and other scholars have given different descriptions of the four Serbian accents. The old accents are rather close to Italian and English accent types, and the new ones to German (this can be easily seen through loanwords).
Here is one possibility of phonetic realization of 4 Serbian accents:
The "finest" realization—the differences between the accents are relatively small, words are pronounced without any special effort—can be found in the most respectable vernaculars of Piva and Drobnjak and in Belgrade and partly in familiar vernaculars in Kolubara district and southwestern Banat. These two groups of vernaculars gave the base for Belgrade old speaker school. Already in surrounding Nikšić (Montenegro), Dubrovnik (Croatia), Užice (Serbia) area stress is more intensive. Modern surveys have shown for instance, that there is a minimal difference in Piva and Drobnjak (where the family of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić had come from) between the syllables that carry short-stressed accent with fall intonation and the short-stressed with rise intonation. In the first edition of Vuk's dictionary (1818), Vuk even marked these two accents as one and the same accent.[9] The difference between the short-stressed accent with falling acentuation and the short-stressed with rise accent is almost lost in two-syllable words (cf. the surveys of Pavle Ivić on Serbian prosody).[10] The informal speech- slang in Belgrade has very special, neutralized accentuation (the oppositions falling/rising, short/long is only partly based on genuine word accents, far more on phonetic letter structure of the word).
Not only the stressed syllables can be short or long. Other syllables have that feature as well. In neo-shtokavian vernaculars, the unstressed long syllable (unstressed length) can occur only after the accented syllable (these lengths are usually called postaccent lengths. Their symbol is macron (-): dèvōjka ('girl'), Jugòslāvija ('Yugoslavia').
The phonetic realization of postaccent lengths is different. In vernaculars of Piva and Drobnjak they are rather very short, without any stress components. In some other East Herzegovinian vernaculars, they are almost stressed (of course, less intense than the really stressed syllable). In many vernaculars—for instance in Belgrade, and in many places in Vojvodina—postaccents lengths are almost lost. That's why foreign students are not expected to pay much attention to them.
Before 1400, most Serbian vernaculars had two accents, both with fall intonation—the short one and the long one. That is why they are called "old accents". By 1500, the old accents moved by one syllable towards the beginning of the word, changing their quality to rising accents. For instance junâk (hero) became jùnāk. The old accents, logically remained only when they were on first syllable. Not all dialects had that evolution; those who had it are called neo-shtokavian. The irradiation point was in east Herzegovina, between Prokletije mountains and town of Trebinje. Since the 1500s people had been emigrating from this area. The biggest migrations were to the north, then toward Military Krajina and to the seaside (Dalmatia, Istria, Dubrovnik area, including islands of Mljet and Šipan). In 1920s and 1930s royal government tried to settle people from this poor mountainous area to Kosovo basin. Vojvodina was settled with inhabitants from this area after WWII.
When all old accents had moved to the beginning of the word for one syllable, this was the result:
see Serbian grammar
Further in Serbian conjugation
Serbian verbs are conjugated in 4 past forms - perfect, aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect - of which the last two have a very limited use (imperfect is still used in some dialects, but majority of native Serbian speakers consider it archaic); 1 future tense (aka 1st future tense - as opposed to the 2nd future tense or the future exact, which is considered a tense of the conditional mood by some contemporary linguists), and 1 present tense. These are the tenses of the indicative mood. Apart from the indicative mood, there is also the imperative mood. The conditional mood has two more tenses, the 1st conditional (commonly used in conditional clauses, both for possible and impossible conditional clauses), and the 2nd conditional (without use in spoken language - it should be used for impossible conditional clauses). Serbian has active and passive voice.
As for the non-finite verb forms, Serbian has 1 infinitive, 2 adjectival participles (the active and the passive), and 2 adverbial participles (the present and the past).
Serbian literature emerged in the Middle Ages, and included such works as Miroslavljevo jevanđelje (Miroslav's Gospel) in 1192 and Dušanov zakonik (Dušan's Code) in 1349. Little secular medieval 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. Although not belonging to the literature proper, the corpus of Serbian literacy in the 1300s and 1400s contains numerous legal, commercial and administrative texts with marked presence of Serbian vernacular juxtaposed on the matrix of Serbian Church Slavonic.
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. The epic poems were mainly written down in the 19th century, and preserved in oral tradition up to 1950s, that is few centuries or even a millennium longer then by most other "epic folks". Goethe and Jacob Grimm learned Serbian in order to read Serbian epic poetry in original. 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. This artificial idiom superseded works of poets and historians like Gavrilo Stefanović Venclović, who wrote in essentially modern Serbian in 1720s- just, these vernacular compositions have remained cloistered from the general public and received due attention only with the advent of modern literary historians and writers like Milorad Pavić. In the early 19th century, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, promoted the spoken language of the people as a literary norm.
Serious Serbian and Croatian dictionaries regularly include Croatian only, and Serbian only words. Three Serbian words that are used in many of the world's languages are vampire, paprika (borrowed via Hungarian), and slivovitz. The English word nightmare is also most probably of Serbian origin. It originated from the name of a demon in Serbian folklore - Mora, which denotes a female demon that comes at night and sits upon its sleeping victims, giving them bad dreams.
The Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (I-XXIII), published by Yugoslav academy of sciencies and arts (JAZU) from 1880 to 1976 is the only general historical dictionary of Serbo-Croatian language. His first editor was Đuro Daničić, followed by Pero Budmani and famous Vukovian Tomislav Maretić. The sources of this are, especially in first volumes, mainly Štokavian.
The standard and the only completed etymological dictionary of Serbian is the "Skok", written by the Croatian linguist Petar Skok: Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika ("Etymological Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian"). I-IV. Zagreb 1971-1974.
There is also a new monumental Etimološki rečnik srpskog jezika (Etymological Dictionary of Serbian). So far, two volumes have been published: I (with words on A-), and II (Ba-Bd).
There are specialized etymological dictionaries for German, Italian, Dalmatian, Turkish, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, English and other loanwords (cf. chapter word origin).
Figures of speakers according to countries:
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