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The Serbian language is one of the standard versions of the Štokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and by Serbs everywhere. The former standard is known as Serbo-Croatian language, now split into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian standards.
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 Stefanović Karadžić when reforming the Cyrillic orthography of Serbian in the 19th century.
Two alphabets are used in Serbian language: the Cyrillic and the Latin. The two alphabets are almost equivalent; the only difference being the glyphs used. This is due to historical reasons; Serbian once being a part of the Serbo-Croat unification brought Latin usage into Serbia.
Standard Serbian is based on the Štokavian dialect. The Ekavian variant is spoken mostly in Serbia and ijekavian in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, south-western Serbia, and Croatia.
The base for is the ijekavian dialect is East-Herzegovinian, and of the ekavian, the Šumadija-Vojvodina dialect. Features of other shtokavian dialects, as well of the Torlakian dialect, which is spoken in southern Serbia, are not accepted as standard.
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Alphabets
Serbian language can be written in two different alphabets: Serbian Cyrillic script (српска ћирилица) and the Serbian Latin script (srpska latinica).
The sort order of the two alphabets is different.
Cyrillic order (called Azbuka (азбука)): 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
Latin order (called abeceda): 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
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Usage of scripts
Some Croatian nationalists, as well as some Serbs do not consider the Latin alphabet as Serbian, but as Croatian. It was not in official use in Serbia before the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed (1918), but it was used by Catholic Serbs in the coastal area of modern Montenegro, as well as in Croatia (Neretva), and Bosnia and Herzegovina (mainly Herzegovina which adjoins the latter two areas). Some famous literary historians and critics from Belgrade, as Jovan Skerlić, proposed to abolish literary chaos and end arguments by accepting Latin as the only alphabet. During WWII, some communist transparents were Latin, while the majority were in Cyrillic. Since the constitutional reforms in the early 1970s, most documents were published in "Serbo-Croatian" Cyrillic and Croatian Latin). Enciklopedija Jugoslavije was published in Serbo-Croat Latin, Serbo-Croat Cyrillic, Slovenian, Macedoanian, Albanian and Hungarian. The only Yugoslav (not traditionally Serbian, Croatian nor Bosnian) newspaper Borba (Battle) was printed in both alphabets: one page in Cyrillic, the following page in Latinic and so on all through the journal, with the script of the front page alternating between the two every day. Whilst Serbo-Croat was widely accepted (before the Yugoslav Wars), the Cyrillic alphabet was used for private purposes predominantly in central Serbia and in Montenegro (until the late 1990s). The Latin alphabet was preferred in Croatia and the only one used by the Croats. In Belgrade, the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina and in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the larger more vibrant towns of Serbia, either alphabet would be used as and how the writer would choose. The Cyrillic-Latinic split may have been 50%-50% but in all areas of Serbia, Latinic tends to dominate among the youth, particularly young adults and in popular culture.
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 either replaced with the base, undiacritised forms (Z C C S) or with two letter combinations that are pronounced similarilly (Zh, Tj, Ch, Sh), 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 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.
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Equivalence of scripts
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 (i.e. ljubav comes after lopta). Therefore, Cyrillic script 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, automatic transliteration of Cyrillic text to Latin is straightforward but automatic transliteration of Latin text to Cyrillic is not possible without use of dictionaries.
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Vowels
The Serbian vowel system is simple, with only five vowels. All vowels are monophthongs. The oral vowels are as follows:
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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. The consonant phoneme table for Serbian is as follows (corresponding Latin letters are below the IPA symbols)
V is often also described as a (lowered) fricative () [A Handbook of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, Wayles Brown and Theresa Alt, SEELRC 2004], which is phonetically closer. However, on phonological level, it doesn't interact with unvoiced consonants as a fricative normally would, but as an approximant.
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 r. A similar feature exists in Czech, Slovak, Macedonian and many other languages. In some vernaculars l can be syllabic as well. However in standard language it's comes only in loanwords as in the name for the river "Vltava" for instance, or debakl, monokl.
In Serbian language phonemes /č, ć, đ, dž/, in contrast to Croatian and Bosnian vernaculars, have in most vernaculars independent phonetic realization.[P. Ivic, Dva glavna pravca razvoja konsonantizma u srpskohrvatskom jeziku, Iz istorije srpskohrvatskog jezika, Niš 1991, p. 82ff.]
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Phonetic interactions
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:
So called older, includes all Slavic languages
So called newer: d, t, l, n + j > đ, ć, lj, nj.
Third (aka second sibilarization), involving shift of k, g, h into c, z, s after e, i and a.
Elision in complex consonant clusters
L→O shift, where final and pre-consonant L morphed into O (historic)
"Labile A", referring to sound "a" occurring only in nominative and genitive plural of nouns with several suffixes (most commonly -ak and -ac): točak (wheel) (N) → točka (G) → točku (D) etc.
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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.
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Phonetics and logopedy
It is interesting to be noticed, that in so called Old-Belgradians vernacular, the phonemic value is preserved, but the phonetic realization twisted. /Č/ is more like čj, /ć/ is more like čh, /đ/ like dž(h) and /dž/ like džj (for instance in words: čaj, hoću, đubre, džemper). It's also interesting that Old-Belgradian, has (not so soft as at the seaside) for /l/, and a special pronaunciation of /r/. That explains the enormous number of kids mixing the /l/ and /lj/, /č/ and /ć/, /đ/ and /dž/ and having problems with pronunciation of /r/ after the World War II when authentic vernacular was confronted with standard pronunciation.
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Cases
There are seven cases in Serbian: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental and locative. It is commonly mistaken, that locative and dative have the same form, and that morpohologically the number of cases is six. The accent is in many examples different in dative and locative: cf. strâni "to the site" (dative)/ (na) stráni "on the site" (locative) or (ka) sâtu "to the clock(tower)"/ (na) sátu "on the clock".
The number of cases, in concert with a non-fixed word-order, can make Serbian difficult to learn for speakers of languages without a strong case system.
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Accents
Serbian has an extended system of accentuation. From phonological point of view it has got four accents which are divided in two groups according to their quality:
there are two accents with fall intonation ("old accents")- the short one and the long one
there are two accent with rise in intonation ("new accents")- the short one, and the long one
However, their realisation varies according to vernacular. That is why Daničić, Budmani, Matešić and other scientists 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 posibility of phonetic realization of 4 Serbian accents:
Short falling (kratkosilazni; symbol `` – double grave) as in Mïlica (PNfem). Pronunciation: /'Milica/('i' is stressed and short, as in English thick,cut).
Long falling (dugosilazni; symbol ^) as in pîvo (meaning beer). Pronunciation: /pi:vo/ ('i' is stressed, first low, than high and than again low, as in English seek, Italian Gino, Marco).
Short rising (kratkouzlazni; symbol ` – grave)as in màskara (meaning eye makeup). Pronunciation: /'maskara/ (the first 'a' is slightly stressed, the second 'a' is higher than the first one, and the third 'a' is even higher than the second one, as in German Arbeiter, Matratze).
Long rising (dugouzlazni; symbol ´) as in čokoláda (meaning chocolate). Pronunciation: /tʃɔkɔ'la:da/ ('a' is stressed, longer than the other vowels, and the intonation is slightly rising, as in German Balade or Schokolade).
The "finest" realization—the differences between the accents are relatively small, words are pronounced without any special effort—can be found in in the most respectable vernaculars of Piva and Drobnjak and in Belgrade and partly in familiar vernaculars in Kolubara district and south-western Banat. These two groups of vernaculars gave the base for Belgrade old speaker school. Alredy in sourranding 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. 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). The informal speech- slang in Belgrade has very special, neutralized accentuation (the oppositions falling/rising, short/long is only partly based on genuin word accents, far more on phonetic letter structure of the word).
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Unstressed (postaccent) lengths
Not only the stressed syllables can be short or long. Other syllables have that feature as well. In neo-shtokavian vernaculars, the unstressed long sylable (unstressed length) can occur only after the accented syllable (these lengths are usually called postaccent lengths. Their symbol is macron (-): dèvōjka (meaning girl), Jugòslāvīja (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-Herzegowinian 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.
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History
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 for one sylable to the beginning of the word, changing their quality to rising accents. For instance junâk (heroe) became jùnāk. The old accents, logically remained only when they were on first sylable. 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 (Dubrovnik area, including islands of Mljet and Šipan). In 1920s and 1930s royal govermant tried to settle people from this poor mountaineous area to Kosovo basin. Vojvodina was settled with inhabitants from this area after the WW II.
When all old accents had moved to the beginning of the word for one syllable, this came out:
In words with two or more syllables the last syllable cannot be stressed
One-syllable words can have only falling accents
In polysyllabic words, if an inner syllable is stressed, then it can have only a rising accent (there are exceptions- in standard and in many vernaculars, for instance when there is a ` - - combination)
In a word with two or more syllables, if the first syllable is stressed, than it can have any of the four accents.
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Syntax
The default word order is Subject-Verb-Object. However, since inflection in most cases uniquely determines the role in sentence, Serbian is mostly 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:
The most common form is the first one (SVO); 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.
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Lexicology
Most of the words in Serbian are of Slavic origin. That means that their roots continue some words reconstructed for Proto-Slavic language. For instance, srce "heart", plav "blue", hleb "bread". Hovewer, a respectable number of them is not inherited from Indo-European but borrowed during the Proto-Slavic period from Germanic vernaculars, and other languages (hleb, kralj, plug...).
In particular, there are many loanwords from different languages borrowed from 800 AD up to now:
There are plenty of loanwords from German. The great number of them is specific for verneculars which were situated in Austrian monarchy (Vojvodina, Slavonija, Lika and partly Bosnia). In the vernacular of Belgrade, German loanwords are relatively frequent and many of them are common in the standard language (zemička,šnajder, šerpa, ram). Almost all cultural words (automobil, restoran, stadion) attested before World War II, were borrowed from (or via) German, even when they are of Franch or English origin (šorc, boks). The accent is an excellent indicator for that, since German loanword in Serbian have rising accents (cf. Amèrika from German Amerika vs. Amêrika> Àmerika from Italian America in Herceg Novi for instance).
Italian words in standard language were often borrowed via German (makarone), or, if they were taken directly from Italian, they show specific, not regular adaptations. For instance špagète for Italian spaghetti instead of "expected" špàgete.
On the other side, like in Croatian, there are plenty of Italian loanwords in the coastal vernaculars (in Spič, Paštrovići, Boka Kotorska, Dubrovnik area and at Kvarner coast), as in the vernaculars near the cost. In some Croatian vernaculars Italian Loanwords made up to 40-50% vernacular vocabulary in 1930s. Most present are words borrowed from Venetian (brancin, altroke, ardura, karonja "lazy man", pršut(a)). Some toponims as Budva and Boka Kotorska (meaning bay of Kotor actually) are borrowed from Venetian.
In coastal area, many words were borrowed from by 1900 extincted Dalmatian language, which is a Romance language, like Italian or French. Many toponims were also borrowed from Dalmatian (Kakrc, Luštica, Lovćen, Sutomore< Sancta Maria).
The number of Turkish loanwords is very large. However these words are disappearing slowly from the standard language, even faster than other, for instance German, historical loanwoards. In Belgrade, for instance,čakšire was before the World War II the only word for pants (today pantalone); some 30-50 years ago avlija was common word for garden in Belgrade (today bašta); only 15 years ago čaršav was usual for tablecloth (today stoljnjak). The gratest number of Turkish loanwords had and have vernaculars of south Serbia (including Kosovo), followed by those of Bosnia and Herzegowina and central Serbia. Many of Turkish loanwords are usual in vernaculars of Vojvodina, Slavonija, Montenegro and Lika as well.
Greek loanwords are very common in Old Serbian (Serbian-Slavonic). Some words are present and common in modern vernaculars in central Serbia (and also in other areas) and in the standard language: hiljada, tiganj, patos. Many words of Othodox ceremony are of Greek origin (parastos).
The number of Hurgarian loanwords in the standard language is small (bitanga, alas, ašov). However, they are present in some vernaculars of Vojvodina and Slavonia and also in historical documents, local literature. Some placenames in northern central Serbia as Barajevo, are probably of Hungarian origin.
Classical international words (words mainly with Latin or Greek roots) are adapted in Serbian like in most European languages, not translated as in Croatian.
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Serbian literature
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Main article: Serbian literature
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 traditon up to 1950s, that is few centuries or even a millennium longer then by most other "epic folks". Goethe and Jacob Grimm learned Serbian language 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.
The first printed book in Serbian, Oktoih was printed in Cetinje in 1494, 40 years after Gutenberg's invention of movable type.
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Lexicography
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.
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Standard dictionaries
Rečnik sprkohrvatskog književnog i narodnog jezika (Dictionary of Serbian standard language and vernaculars) is the biggest dictionary of Serbian language and still unfinished. Starting with 1959, 16 volumes were published, about 40 are expected. Works of Croatian authors are excerpted, if published before 1991.
Rečnik srpskohrvatskoga književnog jezika in 6 volumes, started as a common project of Matica srpska and Matica hrvatska, but only the first three volumes were also published in Croato-Serbian (hrvatskosrpski).
There are no high-standard volume dictionaries wether of Serbian nor of Croatian language. Matica srpska is preparing one. Several volume dictionaries were published in Croatia (for Croatian language) during the 90s and till today (Anić, Enciklopedijski rječnik, Hrvatski rječnik). .
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Bililingual (English-Serbian & Serbian-English) dictionaries
Phraseological dictionaries
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Historical dictionaries
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 Serbian language. His first editor was Đuro Daničić, followed by Pero Budmani and famous "vukovac" Toma Maretić. The sources are, especially in first volumes, mainly shtokavian.
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Etymological dictionaries
The standard and the only completed etymological dictionary of Serbian language is so-called "Skok":
Petar Skok. Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika. I-IV. Zagreb 1971-1974.
There is also a new monumental Etimološki rečnik srpskog jezika (Etymological dictionary of Serbian language). Up to now, two volumes were published: I (with words on A-), and II (Ba-Bd).
There are specialized etimological dictionaries for German, Italian, Dalmatian, Turkish, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, English and other loanwords (cf. chapter word origin).
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Dialect dictionaries
Kosovsko-resavski dialect dictinaries:
Gliša Elezović, Rečnik kosovsko-metohiskog dijalekta I-II. 1932/1935.
Prizren-Timok (Torlakian) dialect dictinaries:
Brana Mitrović, Rečnik leskovačkog govora. Leskovac 1984.
Nikola Živković, Rečnik pirotskog govora. Pirot, 1987.
Miodrag Marković, Rečnik crnorečkog govora I-II. 1986/1993.
Jakša Dinić, Rečnik timočkog govora I-III.1988-1992.
Momčilo Zlatanović, Rečnik govora južne Srbije. Vranje, 1998, 1–491.
East-Herzegowinian dialect dictionaries:
Milija Stanić, Uskočki rečnik I–II. Beograd 1990/1991.
Miloš Vujičić, Rečnik govora Prošćenja kod Mojkovca. Podgorica, 1995.
Srđan Musić, Romanizmi u severozapadnoj Boki Kotorskoj. 1972.
Mihailo Bojanić/ Rastislava Trivunac, Rječnik dubrovačkog govora. Beograd 2003.
Svetozar Gagović, Iz leksike Pive. Beograd 2004.
Rada Stijović, Iz leksike Vasojevića. 1990.
Drago Ćupić — Željko Ćupić, Rečnik govora Zagarača. 1997.
Vesna Lipovac-Radulović, Romanizmi u Crnoj Gori — jugoistočni dio Boke Kotorske. Cetinje — Titograd, 1981.
Vesna Lipovac-Radulović, Romanizmi u Budvi i Paštrovićima. Novi Sad 1997.
Rečnik sprskih govora Vojvodine. Novi Sad.
M. Peić — G. Bačlija, Rečnik bačkih Bunjevaca. Novi Sad 1990.
Mile Tomić, Rečnik radimskog govora — dijaspora, Rumunija. 1989.
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Demographics
Figures of speakers according to countries:
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Differences to similar languages
Main article: Differences in official languages in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia
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See also
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Online dictionaries
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