Serbian language
Serbian is the standard variety of the Serbo-Croatian language, mainly used by Serbs. It is the national official language and literary standard of Serbia, one of the official languages in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, and a recognized minority language in numerous countries.
Serbian is based on the most widespread supradialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian, which is also the basis of other Serbo-Croatian standard varieties: Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.
Serbian is a rare example of synchronic digraphia, using both Cyrillic and Latin scripts.
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. 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, 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. 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, 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 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, 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
During the 18th century, among Eastern Orthodox Serbs in the Habsburg Monarchy, various influences from the earlier Russian ecclesiastical and literary 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 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, 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, 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. Serbian is a co-official language in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, where it is spoken almost exclusively by the ethnic Serb population, representing roughly one-third and 5% of the total population in each entity, respectively. In Montenegro, Serbian remains the most widely spoken language, with 43% of the population declaring it as their mother tongue despite its status as a recognized minority language; it is used not only by those identifying as ethnic Serbs but also by approximately one-quarter of those declaring Montenegrin ethnicity. Furthermore, Serbian enjoys recognized minority language status in Croatia, North Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia.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.