Serbian 
"welcome"
"welcome" 
Introduction|
The eastern part of Yugoslavia (i.e., Serbia, Montenegro, portions of Bosnia and Hercegovina) were religiously and culturally distinct from the western part of of the country (i.e., Croatia, and portions of Bosnia and Hercegovina). Serbia was under Ottoman rule, while Croatia was under Austro-Hungarian rule. As a result, Serbian and Croatian are based on different dialects and are written with Although Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian differ in a number of ways, these differences do not preclude mutual intelligibility and, in fact, are not as great as the differences within the languages themselves. This is not surprising since the continuous migrations of Slavic populations during the five hundred years of Turkish rule produced a crazy quilt of local dialects that cross more recently established national boundaries. Standard Serbian, based on the Shtokavian and Ekavian pronunciations, is the official language of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is used by the government, at all levels of education, in the media, and in all aspects of social, cultural, and private life. |
Serbo-Croatian belongs to the South Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian, defined as the common language of Serbs, Croats, 
Bosniaks and Montenegrins, officially split into three mutually intelligible languages -- Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Though the term "Serbo-Croatian" went out of use, it continues to be a focus of controversy due to its historical, cultural, and political connotations and to the lack of precision in the definition of the term "language." Suffice it to say that these languages are artifacts of political, rather than linguistic decisions. 
different alphabets. Serbian and Croatian became one language in the 19th century as part of an effort to create an independent South Slavic state (yug means "south"). 
There are over 10 million speakers of Serbian in Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. It is also spoken in Albania, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Greece, Macedonia, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, USA. 
Dialects
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The dialect picture for Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian is rather complex and is shared by all the languages. 1. One major dialectal difference is based on the three different present-day pronunciations of the vowels that replaced the Common Slavic long vowel [æ], known as jat'.
*reconstructed form 2. The other major dialectal difference is based on the pronounciation of the iniitial consonant in the word for "what."
3. Torlak, a small dialect group spoken in western Serbia, is characterized by a gradual loss of cases as it blends into Macedonian and Bulgarian. |
Structure
Sound System
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Vowels Consonants
As in Russian, consonant clusters are either all voiced or all voiceless, i.e., they assimilate to the last consonant in the cluster. This rule does not apply to nasals, laterals, or trills. Stress
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Click here
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Serbian grammar is similar in complexity to the grammar of most other Slavic languages. Nouns
Adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number, and case. Verbs
Serbian aspect involves grammar, lexicon, semantics, and pragmatics. Perfective verbs are formed by prefixation. The system is complex enough to have occupied generations of linguists and frustrated generations of learners. Verbs of motion constitute a special subcategory of Serbian verbs. They are characterized by a complex system of directional and aspectual prefixes and suffixes. Word order |
Hurdy Gurdy |
Most differences among Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian involve vocabulary, although the bulk of the vocabulary comes from a common Slavic stock. However, loanwords may differ slightly across the three languages because, historically, in Bosnian and Croatian, they came mostly from German and Italian, while Serbian borrowed words mostly from French and Russian.
An interesting difference in basic vocabulary between Serbian and Bosnian, on the one hand, and Croatian, on the other hand, involves the names of the months. While Serbian and Bosnian borrowed the names from western languages, Croatian uses inherently Slavic words, e.g., Croatian travanj and Bosnian/Serbian april, Croatian listopad (literally "leaf fall") and Bosnian/Serbian oktobar. |
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Below are some common phrases in Serbian. |
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Writing
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The original alphabet used by both the Serbs and Croats was Glagolitic. It was created by the monks Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century for Old Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the time. In the Orthodox areas of Serbia and Bosnia, Glagolitic was replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet in the 12th century. The Cyrillic alphabet (along with the Latin alphabet, which was adopted in Catholic areas) was reformed by linguists in the 19th century to create a one-to-one correspondence between the language's sounds and letters as well as a one-to-one correspondence between the symbols in the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was revised by Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic in the 19th century. The Croatian Latin alphabet was revised shortly afterwards by Ljudevit Gaj who added five extra symbols to the standard Latin alphabet by borrowing letters d from Czech and Polish, and inventing the digraphs "lj", "nj" and "dz" that represent single phonemes which are represented by single letters in the Cyrillic alphabet. The two alphabets map well onto each other. Today, Serbian and Bosnian are written in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, while Croatian is written only the Latin script. |
Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in both Serbian orthographies. |
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Resources |
Click here to find out where Serbian is taught in the United States. Resources for the study of Serbian language and culture |
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How difficult is it to learn Serbian? Serbian is considered to be a Category II language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English. |
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