Serbian language

Not to be confused with the Sorbian languages.

Serbian
српски језик / srpski jezik
Pronunciation[sr̩̂pskiː]
Native toSerbia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Montenegro
Kosovo
Croatia
RegionSoutheastern Europe
EthnicitySerbs
Native speakers
5.5 million (Serbia)
1 million (Republic of Srpska)
250 000 (Montenegro)
c. 12 million (2009/2022 census)[1]
Official status
Official language in
Recognised minority
language in
Regulated byBoard for Standardization of the Serbian Language
Language codes
ISO 639-1sr
ISO 639-2srp
ISO 639-3srp
Glottologserb1264
Linguaspherepart of 53-AAA-g
  Countries/regions where Serbian is an official language.
  Countries/regions where it is recognized as a minority language.
Serbian is not endangered according to the classification system of the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
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Serbian (српски / srpski, pronounced [sr̩̂pskiː]) is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Serbs.[8][9][10][11][12][13] It is the official and national language of Serbia, one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina and co-official in Montenegro and Kosovo. It is a recognized minority language in Croatia, North Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

Standard Serbian is based on the most widespread dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian (more specifically on the dialects of Šumadija-Vojvodina and Eastern Herzegovina),[14] which is also the basis of standard Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin varieties[15] and therefore the Declaration on the Common Language of Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Montenegrins was issued in 2017.[16][17] The other dialect spoken by Serbs is Torlakian in southeastern Serbia, which is transitional to Macedonian and Bulgarian.

Serbian is practically the only European standard language whose speakers are fully functionally digraphic,[18] using both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was devised in 1814 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić, who created it based on phonemic principles. The Latin alphabet used for Serbian (latinica) was designed by the Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s based on the Czech system with a one-to-one grapheme-phoneme correlation between the Cyrillic and Latin orthographies, resulting in a parallel system.[19]

  1. ^ "Српски језик говори 12 милиона људи" (in Serbian). РТС. 2009-02-20. Archived from the original on February 23, 2014.
  2. ^ "Language and alphabet Article 13". Constitution of Montenegro. WIPO. 19 October 2007. Archived from the original on 28 July 2013. Serbian, Bosnian, Albanian and Croatian shall also be in the official use.
  3. ^ "Ec.Europa.eu" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-11-30.
  4. ^ "B92.net". Archived from the original on 2013-11-10.
  5. ^ "Czech Republic Overview". Minority Rights Group International. Archived from the original on 2012-10-26. Retrieved 2012-10-24.
  6. ^ "Národnostní menšiny v České republice a jejich jazyky" [National Minorities in Czech Republic and Their Language] (PDF) (in Czech). Government of Czech Republic. p. 2. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2016-03-15. Podle čl. 3 odst. 2 Statutu Rady je jejich počet 12 a jsou uživateli těchto menšinových jazyků: ..., srbština a ukrajinština
  7. ^ "Macedonia Overview". Minority Rights Group International. Archived from the original on 2012-10-26. Retrieved 2012-10-24.
  8. ^ David Dalby, Linguasphere (1999/2000, Linguasphere Observatory), pg. 445, 53-AAA-g, "Srpski+Hrvatski, Serbo-Croatian".
  9. ^ Benjamin W. Fortson IV, Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (2010, Blackwell), p. 431, "Because of their mutual intelligibility, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are usually thought of as constituting one language called Serbo-Croatian."
  10. ^ Václav Blažek, "On the Internal Classification of Indo-European Languages: Survey" retrieved 20 Oct 2010 Archived 2012-02-04 at the Wayback Machine, pp. 15–16.
  11. ^ Ćalić, Jelena (2021). "Pluricentricity in the classroom: the Serbo-Croatian language issue for foreign language teaching at higher education institutions worldwide". Sociolinguistica: European Journal of Sociolinguistics. 35 (1). De Gruyter: 113–140. doi:10.1515/soci-2021-0007. ISSN 0933-1883. S2CID 244134335. The debate about the status of the Serbo-Croatian language and its varieties has recently shifted (again) towards a position which looks at the internal variation within Serbo-Croatian through the prism of linguistic pluricentricity
  12. ^ Mader Skender, Mia (2022). "Schlussbemerkung" [Summary]. Die kroatische Standardsprache auf dem Weg zur Ausbausprache [The Croatian standard language on the way to ausbau language] (PDF) (Dissertation). UZH Dissertations (in German). Zurich: University of Zurich, Faculty of Arts, Institute of Slavonic Studies. pp. 196–197. doi:10.5167/uzh-215815. Retrieved 8 June 2022. Obwohl das Kroatische sich in den letzten Jahren in einigen Gebieten, vor allem jedoch auf lexikalischer Ebene, verändert hat, sind diese Änderungen noch nicht bedeutend genug, dass der Terminus Ausbausprache gerechtfertigt wäre. Ausserdem können sich Serben, Kroaten, Bosnier und Montenegriner immer noch auf ihren jeweiligen Nationalsprachen unterhalten und problemlos verständigen. Nur schon diese Tatsache zeigt, dass es sich immer noch um eine polyzentrische Sprache mit verschiedenen Varietäten handelt.
  13. ^ Kordić, Snježana (2024). "Ideology Against Language: The Current Situation in South Slavic Countries" (PDF). In Nomachi, Motoki; Kamusella, Tomasz (eds.). Languages and Nationalism Instead of Empires. Routledge Histories of Central and Eastern Europe. London: Routledge. pp. 168–169. doi:10.4324/9781003034025-11. ISBN 978-0-367-47191-0. OCLC 1390118985. S2CID 259576119. SSRN 4680766. COBISS.SR 125229577. COBISS 171014403. Archived from the original on 2024-01-10. Retrieved 2024-01-23.
  14. ^ Ljiljana Subotić; Dejan Sredojević; Isidora Bjelaković (2012), Fonetika i fonologija: Ortoepska i ortografska norma standardnog srpskog jezika (in Serbo-Croatian), FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET NOVI SAD, archived from the original on 2014-01-03
  15. ^ Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Or Montenegrin? Or Just 'Our Language'? Archived 2010-11-05 at the Wayback Machine, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 21, 2009
  16. ^ Nosovitz, Dan (11 February 2019). "What Language Do People Speak in the Balkans, Anyway?". Atlas Obscura. Archived from the original on 11 February 2019. Retrieved 6 May 2019.
  17. ^ Zanelli, Aldo (2018). Eine Analyse der Metaphern in der kroatischen Linguistikfachzeitschrift Jezik von 1991 bis 1997 [Analysis of Metaphors in Croatian Linguistic Journal Language from 1991 to 1997]. Studien zur Slavistik; 41 (in German). Hamburg: Kovač. pp. 21, 83. ISBN 978-3-8300-9773-0. OCLC 1023608613. (NSK). (FFZG)
  18. ^ Magner, Thomas F. (10 January 2001). "Digraphia in the territories of the Croats and Serbs". International Journal of the Sociology of Language (150). doi:10.1515/ijsl.2001.028. Archived from the original on 11 October 2017. Retrieved 27 April 2018.
  19. ^ Comrie, Bernard; Corbett, Greville G. (1 September 2003). The Slavonic Languages. Taylor & Francis. p. 45. ISBN 978-0-203-21320-9. Retrieved 23 December 2013. Following Vuk's reform of Cyrillic (see above) in the early nineteenth century, Ljudevit Gaj in the 1830s performed the same operation on Latinica, using the Czech system and producing a one-to-one symbol correlation between Cyrillic and Latinica as applied to the Serbian and Croatian parallel system.