Serbian language

History

The history of the Serbian language traces its origins through successive stages of differentiation within the South Slavic subgroup of Slavic languages. This process intensified after the Slavic migrations of the 6th and 7th centuries, leading to the emergence of Serbian alongside other South Slavic languages. As the ancestor of all Slavic languages, the Proto-Slavic language emerged between approximately 1500 and 1000 BC in the southern portion of the Proto-Balto-Slavic linguistic area. Linguistic evidence, such as the consistent preservation of vocabulary related to local hydrology, flora, and fauna across modern Slavic languages, supports this location, roughly corresponding to areas of eastern Poland, southern Belarus, and northwestern Ukraine during classical antiquity (encompassing the Vistula, Bug, Dnieper, and Pripyat river basins). The language reached its peak in the 5th and 6th centuries, expanding rapidly westward, southward, eastward, and northward during Slavic migrations.

Dialectal differentiation began during this period, though mutual intelligibility persisted; by the 8th century, a largely uniform Proto-Slavic was spoken from Thessaloniki in the south to Veliky Novgorod in the north. The final pan-dialectal changes occurred in the 9th century, after which individual Slavic languages gradually emerged. A degree of general Slavic mutual intelligibility continued for several centuries, as evidenced by the missionary work of Cyril and Methodius, who used a South Slavic dialect from the Thessaloniki region to evangelize Slavs in Great Moravia. The loss of weak jers (reduced vowels ъ and ь), occurring regionally between the 10th and 12th centuries, marks the conventional end of Proto-Slavic, coinciding with the appearance of written records showing significant divergences and the development of distinct recensions.

The language used in works of Cyril and Methodius, and their later followers, became known as the Old Church Slavonic (also Old Slavonic, or Old Slavic). As the earliest attested Slavic literary language, it was codified in the 9th century based on the South Slavic dialects spoken around Thessaloniki, using the Glagolitic and later Cyrillic scripts for translating biblical and liturgical texts. During the Middle Ages, it served as the primary literary and liturgical language for most Slavic peoples, influencing the development of subsequent vernacular literary traditions.

Middle Ages

During the medieval and early modern periods, the use of Old Slavic literary language among Serbs was marked by various influences from the Serbian old vernacular language, thus creating a distinctive Serbian redaction of the Old Slavic. That redaction or recension is referred to as the old Serbian Church-Slavic literary language (also Serbian-Slavonic / Serbo-Slavonic, or Serbian-Slavic / Serbo-Slavic), and in that language works of the Medieval Serbian literature were created. In the same time, Old Serbian vernacular language was used in private letters and various documents, particularly during the late medieval and later (early modern) periods.

Serbian redaction of Church Slavonic played a key role in medieval Serbian written culture before the later rise of vernacular-based standards. The oldest surviving manuscripts in this recension originate from regions such as Zeta and Zachlumia (Hum), though linguistic features suggest its development may have occurred farther east, nearer the early centres of Slavic literacy, Ohrid and Preslav. The area around the present-day border of Serbia and North Macedonia, north of the Kratovo-Skopje-Tetovo line, is considered to be the area of its origin. The oldest preserved written monuments, from the end of the 12th century, testify to the fact that the process of forming the Serbian Slavonic was already complete. It had three established orthographies:

• Zeta-Hum, which was the oldest and used in Serbia until the beginning of the 13th century
• Raška, which succeeded Zeta-Hum in Serbia and was in use until the first decades of the 15th century
• Resava, which originated in the 15th century

Early modern period

Main article: Slavonic-Serbian

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Serbian Church Slavic language continued to be used as the liturgical and literary language within the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć, and those traditions continued up to the beginning of the 18th century. In works of the early modern Serbian printing, from the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 17th century, liturgical contents were printed in Serbian Church Slavic, while colophons with introductions were composed under the influence of Serbian vernacular language, that was commonly used both in official and private epistolography.

During the 18th century, among Eastern Orthodox Serbs in the Habsburg Monarchy, various influences from the earlier Russian ecclesiastical and literary reforms (known as the Nikon's reforms) were accepted within the Serbian Orthodox Metropolitanate of Karlovci, thus leading to several major changes: Serbian redaction of the Church Slavic was gradually replaced in liturgical use by the official (synodical, or neo-Moscowian) Russian Church Slavonic redaction, and those changes also influenced the Serbian literary language, making it more distinctive from the common Serbian vernacular language. The use of Russian-Slavonic language among Serbs consequently led to the creation of a specific Slavonic-Serbian language (also known as Slavo-Serbian, a hybrid language that was used during the second half of the 18th century and the frst half of the 19th century by Serbian educated elites.

Modern period

In the early 19th century, Vuk Karadžić reformed the Serbian literary language by basing it on the vernacular folk speech, adopting the principle 'Write as you speak.' He also standardized the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by following strict phonemic principles on the Johann Christoph Adelung's model and Jan Hus's Czech alphabet. Karadžić's reforms of the Serbian literary language modernized it and distanced it from the Slavonic-Serbian and Church Slavonic, bringing it closer to common folk speech. For example, Karadžić discarded earlier letters and signs that had no match in common Serbian speech and introduced six new Cyrillic letters to make writing the Serbian language simpler.

Because the Slavonic-Serbian written language of the early 19th century contained many words connected to the Orthodox church and a large number of loanwords from Church Slavonic, Karadžić proposed to abandon this written language and to create a new one, based on the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect which he spoke. Some Serbian clergy and other linguists opposed him, for example, the high clergy based in the Serbian Orthodox Church seat in Sremski Karlovci (near Novi Sad), who viewed the grammar and vocabulary of the Eastern Herzegovinian dialect as almost a foreign tongue, unacceptable as a basis for a modern language. But Karadžić successfully insisted that his linguistic standard was closer to popular speech and could be understood and written by more people. He called his dialect Herzegovinian because, as he wrote, "Serbian is spoken most purely and correctly in Herzegovina and in Bosnia." Karadžić never visited those lands, but his family roots and speech came from Herzegovina. Ultimately, Vuk Karadžić's ideas and linguistic standard won against his clerical and scientific opponents. Karadžić was, together with Đuro Daničić, the main Serbian signatory to the Vienna Literary Agreement of 1850, which, encouraged by Austrian authorities, laid the foundation for the Serbo-Croatian language; Karadžić himself only ever referred to the language as "Serbian".

The Vukovian effort of language standardization lasted the remainder of the century. Before then the Serbs had achieved an independent state (1878), and a flourishing national culture based in Belgrade and Novi Sad. Despite the Vienna Literary Agreement, the Serbs had by this time developed an Ekavian pronunciation, which was the native speech of their two cultural capitals as well as the great majority of the Serb population. Vuk Karadžić greatly influenced South Slavic linguists across Southeast Europe: in Croatia, the linguist Tomislav Maretić acknowledged Karadžić's work as foundational to his codification of Croatian grammar.

Geographic distribution

The Serbian language holds status of official or recognized minority language in ten countries, where over 7 million people have declared it as their mother tongue. It serves as the official language of Serbia, where it is the native tongue of 84% of the population.{{Cite web | access-date = 29 December 2025 |access-date=2025-12-29 | access-date = 2025-12-29

The language is also represented among the Serb diaspora in Europe and overseas. Countries with significant numbers of speakers include Germany, Austria, United States, France, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and Sweden.

Differences from other Serbo-Croatian standard varieties

Main article: Comparison of Serbo-Croatian standard varieties

Serbian is a standard variety of Serbo-Croatian with other standard varieties being Bosnian, Croatian, and Montenegrin. These varieties are based on the same Shtokavian supradialect and are fully mutually intelligible - speakers can understand each other without difficulty, with intelligibility often exceeding that of variants in other pluricentric languages like English, German, or Spanish. The differences are minor and comparable to regional variants of English (e.g., British vs. American English) rather than separate languages like Spanish and Italian. Grammar, syntax, and core vocabulary are nearly identical.

Writing system

Main article: Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, Gaj's Latin alphabet, Yugoslav Braille

Serbian language uses both Cyrillic (ћирилица, ćirilica) and Latin script (латиница, latinica). Serbian is a rare language with active digraphia, a situation where all literate members of a society have two interchangeable writing systems available to them.

Serbian Cyrillic, widely regarded as a key symbol of Serb cultural identity, was devised in 1814 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić, who designed it according to strict phonemic principles (one letter per sound). The Latin alphabet used for Serbian 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 orthographic system.

In Serbia, the Constitution designates Serbian Cyrillic as the official script, mandating its application in the legal and administrative domains. However, the law does not regulate scripts in standard language, or standard language itself by any means, leaving the choice of script as a matter of personal preference and to the free will in all aspects of life (publishing, media, trade and commerce, etc.), except in the legal and government sphere, where Cyrillic is required. In general, the alphabets are used interchangeably; media and publishers typically select one alphabet or the other. In the public sphere, with logos, outdoor signage and retail packaging, the Latin script predominates, although both scripts are commonly seen. Traffic signs and directional signs, as well as place names on roads are written with both Cyrillic and Latin script. To most Serbs, the Latin script tends to imply a cosmopolitan or neutral attitude, while Cyrillic appeals to a more traditional or vintage sensibility. A survey from 2014 showed that 47% of the Serbian population favors the Latin alphabet whereas 36% favors the Cyrillic one.

Serbian Cyrillic is also script in official use in both Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina, alongside the Latin alphabet.

Alphabetic order

The sort order of the ćirilica (ћирилица) alphabet:

• 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

The sort order of the latinica (латиница) alphabet:

• Latin order called Abeceda (абецеда): 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

Grammar

Main article: Serbo-Croatian grammar

Serbian is a highly inflected language, with grammatical morphology for nouns, pronouns and adjectives as well as verbs.

Nouns

Serbian nouns are classified into three declensional types, denoted largely by their nominative case endings as "-a" type, "-i" and "-e" type. Into each of these declensional types may fall nouns of any of three genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. Each noun may be inflected to represent the noun's grammatical case, of which Serbian has seven:

• Nominative
• Genitive
• Dative
• Accusative
• Vocative
• Instrumental
• Locative

Nouns are further inflected to represent the noun's number, singular or plural.

Pronouns

Pronouns, when used, are inflected along the same case and number morphology as nouns. Serbian is a pro-drop language, meaning that pronouns may be omitted from a sentence when their meaning is easily inferred from the text. In cases where pronouns may be dropped, they may also be used to add emphasis. For example:

Adjectives

Adjectives in Serbian may be placed before or after the noun they modify, but must agree in number, gender and case with the modified noun.

Verbs

Serbian verbs are conjugated in four 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 the majority of native Serbian speakers consider it archaic), one future tense (also known as the first future tense, as opposed to the second future tense or the future exact, which is considered a tense of the conditional mood by some contemporary linguists), and one 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 first conditional (commonly used in conditional clauses, both for possible and impossible conditional clauses) and the second conditional (without use in the 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 one infinitive, two adjectival participles (the active and the passive), and two adverbial participles (the present and the past).

Dialects

Main article: Dialects of Serbo-Croatian

Serbian is based on Shtokavian, the prestige supradialect of Serbo-Croatian. The primary subdivisions of Shtokavian are based on two principles: one is the way the old Slavic phoneme yat has changed (in the case of Serbian, Ekavian or Ijekavian), second in different accents (whether the subdialect is Old-Shtokavian or Neo-Shtokavian).

• in Ekavian pronunciation (ekavski ), yat has conflated into the vowel e. Ekavian is dominant among speakers of Serbian in Serbia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Romania, and Hungary.
• in Ijekavian pronunciation (ijekavski ), yat has come to be pronounced ije. Ijekavian is dominant among speakers of Serbian in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Croatia.

The dialects of Shtokavian, regarded traditionally as Serbian, include:

• Šumadija–Vojvodina (Ekavian, Neo-Shtokavian): central and northern Serbia
• Eastern Herzegovinian (Ijekavian/Ekavian, Neo-Shtokavian): southwestern Serbia, western half of Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia
• Kosovo–Resava (Ekavian, Old-Shtokavian): eastern-central Serbia, northern Kosovo
• Smederevo–Vršac (Ekavian, Old-Shtokavian): northern-central Serbia
• Prizren–Timok (Ekavian, Old-Shtokavian): southeastern Serbia, eastern Kosovo
• Zeta–Raška (Ijekavian, Old-Shtokavian): eastern half of Montenegro, southwestern Serbia

Vocabulary

Most Serbian words are of native Slavic lexical stock, tracing back to the Proto-Slavic language. The classical languages Latin and Greek are the source of many words, used mostly in international terminology. Many Latin terms entered Serbian during the time when present-day territories populated by Serbs were part of the Roman Empire and also in the later centuries through Romanian and Aromanian. The loanwords of Greek origin in Serbian are a product of the influence of the liturgical language of the Orthodox Church. Many of the numerous loanwords from another Turkic language, Ottoman Turkish and, via Ottoman Turkish, from Arabic were adopted into Serbian during the long period of Ottoman rule.

Dictionaries

Vuk Karadžić's "Serbian Dictionary" (Srpski rječnik), published in 1818, is the earliest dictionary of modern literary Serbian. The "Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian language" (Rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika), published by Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in twenty-three volumes from 1880 to 1976, is the only general historical dictionary of Serbo-Croatian. There are older, pre-standard dictionaries, such as the German–Serbian dictionary, published in 1791, or 15th century-Arabic-Persian-Greek-Serbian Conversation Textbook.

Standard dictionaries include:

• "Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian Literary and Vernacular Language" (Rečnik srpskohrvatskog književnog i narodnog jezika), published by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts is the most comprehensive dictionary of Serbian (and Serbo-Croatian as a whole). It remains unfinished, with publication ongoing since 1959. As of 2025, 22 volumes were published, containing around 250,000 entries, while the complete dictionary is expected to comprise 40 volumes with around 500,000 entries, making it one of the most comprehensive in the world, surpassing the "Oxford English Dictionary" (around 300,000 entries), the German "Deutsches Wörterbuch" (around 350,000), and the Dutch "Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal" (about 430,000).
• "Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian Literary Language" (Rečnik srpskohrvatskoga književnog jezika), published in six volumes from 1967 to 1976, began as a joint project between Matica srpska (which issued it in Cyrillic script) and Matica hrvatska (which issued it in Latin script), but only the first three volumes were published by Matica hrvatska due to negative feedback from Croatian linguists.
• "Dictionary of the Serbian language" (Rečnik srpskog jezika) in one volume, published in 2007 by Matica srpska, containing more than 85,000 entries.

The only completed etymological dictionary of Serbian is "Etymological Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian language" (Etimologijski rječnik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika), published in four volumes from 1971 to 1974. There is also a new monumental "Etymological Dictionary of Serbian language" (Etimološki rečnik srpskog jezika), which is currently work in progress, with two volumes published.

Sample text

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Serbian, written in the Cyrillic script:

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Serbian, written in the Latin script:

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English:

Notes

References

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