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| Serbian српски srpski | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pronunciation: | [ˈsr̩pskiː] | |
| Spoken in: | See below under "Official status", besides that in Croatia and as an immigrant\'s language spread over Central and Western Europe, as well as Northern America | |
| Region: | Central Europe, Southern Europe | |
| Total speakers: | over 12 million | |
| Ranking: | around 63 | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Slavic South Slavic Western South Slavic Serbian | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language in: |  Serbia Bosnia and Herzegovina Montenegro Macedonia (regional) Romania (regional)
Recognised minority language in:
| |
| Regulated by: | Board for Standardization of the Serbian Language | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | sr | |
| ISO 639-2: | scc (B) | srp (T) |
| ISO 639-3: | srp | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Serbian (српски језик; srpski jezik) is the most spoken South Slavic language. It is one of the standard versions of the Shtokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and by Serbs in the Serbian diaspora. The former standard is known as Serbo-Croatian, now split into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian standards. It counts among official (and minority) languages of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, Romania,Republic of Macedonia and Hungary.
Two alphabets are used to write the Serbian language: a variation on the Cyrillic alphabet, devised by Vuk Karadžić, and a variation on the Latin alphabet, devised by Ljudevit Gaj. The characters of the two alphabets map to each other one-to-one.
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.
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Serbian Cyrillic and Serbian Latin, from Comparative orthography of European languages. Source: Vuk Stefanović Karadžić Srpske narodne pjesme (Serbian folk poems), Vienna, 1841
Serbian language can be written in two different alphabets: Serbian Cyrillic script (ћирилица) and the Serbian Latin (latinica).
| Cyrillic | Latin | Cyrillic | Latin | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| А | A | Н | N | |
| Б | B | Њ | Nj | |
| В | V | О | O | |
| Г | G | П | P | |
| Д | D | Р | R | |
| Ђ | Đ | С | S | |
| Е | E | Т | T | |
| Ж | Ž | Ћ | Ć | |
| З | Z | У | U | |
| И | I | Ф | F | |
| Ј | J | Х | H | |
| К | K | Ц | C | |
| Л | L | Ч | Č | |
| Љ | Lj | Џ | Dž | |
| М | M | Ш | Š |
|
The sort order of the two alphabets is different.
Cyrillic alphabet was in exclusive use in Serbia before the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed (1918), but Latin was used by Serbs in the coastal area of modern Montenegro as well as in Croatia (Dubrovnik-Neretva County), 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. Especially during the socialist era, Latin has made a major breakthrough even in Serbia proper. Since the constitutional reforms in the early 1970s, most documents were published in "Serbo-Croatian" Cyrillic and "Croato-Serbian" (sometimes Serbo-Croatian) LatinCf. The Službeni list SFRJ (Federal Gazette), was published from 1974 to 1991 in Serbo-Croat, Croato-Serbian, Macedonian, Slovenian and in the languages of national minorities. Enciklopedija Jugoslavije was published in Zagreb in "Croatian or Serbian" (the way Croats referred to Serbo-Croatian language) Latin, "Serbo-Croat" (the way Serbs, Montenegrins, Muslims and all other nations in Yugoslavia referred to Serbo-Croatian language) Cyrillic, Slovenian, Macedonian, Albanian and Hungarian. The only Yugoslav (not traditionally Serbian, Croatian nor Bosnian) newspaper Borba was printed in both alphabets: one page in Cyrillic, the following page in Latin 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 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 exact percentage of use of alphabets is difficult to assess today. Of the major newspapers, Politika, Večernje Novosti, Glas Javnosti, and Dnevnik are printed in Cyrillic, while Blic, Kurir, Danas and Press use Latin. Of the major TV outlets, only the public service Radio Television of Serbia uses primarily Cyrillic (as well as former BK TV), while Pink, B92 and most others use Latin. An informal poll on the Internet forum SerbianCafe.com showed no apparent preference.SerbianCafe.com: Ankete. According to the data collected by Association for Protection of Cyrillic, over 80% of public inscriptions in Novi Sad is in Latin, and over 60% in Belgrade; 5/6 of (randomly sampled) magazines is in Latin, as well as vast majority of university textbooks (however, the proportion is the opposite for high-school ones).Dragoljub Petrović (2002-2-11). Ćirilički računarski programi kao uslov opstanka srpske pismenosti i kulture (Serbian). Project Rastko.
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 forms without diacritics (Z C C S) or with two letter combinations that are pronounced similarly (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.
IETF language tags sr-Cryl and sr-Latn disambiguate use of the two scripts.IANA Language Subtag Registry
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 (e.g. ljubav, \'love\', comes after lopta, \'ball\'). The present Cyrillic script, having been devised for the language itself, is 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
The Serbian vowel system is simple, with only five vowels. All vowels are monophthongs. The oral vowels are as follows:Consonant-Vowel Interactions in Serbian: Features, Representations and Constraint Interactions, Bruce Morén, Center for Advanced Study of Theoretical Linguistics, Tromsø, 2005
| Latin script | Cyrillic script | IPA | Description | English approximation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| a | а | /a/ | open central unrounded | father |
| i | и | /i/ | close front unrounded | seek |
| e | е | /e/ | (open-)mid front unrounded | ten |
| o | о | /o/ | (open-)mid back rounded | caught (British) |
| u | у | /u/ | closed back rounded | boom |
The consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants. Voicing is phonemic, but aspiration is not. The consonant phoneme table for Serbian is as follows (corresponding Latin letters are below the IPA symbols)
| Consonant Phonemes of Serbian | ||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilabial | Labio- Dental | Dental | Alveolar | Post- Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | ||||||||
| Nasal | /m/ M | /n/ N | /ɲ/ Nj | |||||||||||
| Plosive | /p/ P | /b/ B | /t/ T | /d/ D | /k/ K | /g/ G | ||||||||
| Affricate | /ʦ/ C | /tʃ/ Č | /dʒ/ Dž | /ʨ/ Ć | /ʥ/ Đ | |||||||||
| Fricative | /f/ F | /s/ S | /z/ Z | /ʃ/ Š | /ʒ/ Ž | /x/ H | ||||||||
| Approximant | /ʋ/ [a] V | /j/ J | ||||||||||||
| Trill | /r/ R | |||||||||||||
| Lateral | /l/ L | /ʎ/ Lj | ||||||||||||
^ V is often also described as a (lowered) fricative ([v̞]),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 /r̩/. A similar feature exists in Czech, Slovak, Macedonian and many other languages. In some vernaculars /l/ can be syllabic as well. However, in the standard language, it appears only in loanwords as in the name for the Czech river Vltava for instance, or debakl (дебакл), monokl (монокл) and bicikl (бицикл).
In Serbian, the phonemes /tʃ/, ʨ, /dʒ/, and /ʥ/ (in contrast to Croatian and Bosnian vernaculars) have an independent phonetic realization in most vernaculars.P. Ivic, Dva glavna pravca razvoja konsonantizma u srpskohrvatskom jeziku, Iz istorije srpskohrvatskog jezika, Niš 1991, p. 82ff.
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:
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.
Serbian has an extended system of accentuation. From the phonological point of view it has four accents which are divided into two groups according to their quality:
However, their realization 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 possibility of phonetic realization of 4 Serbian accents:
The "finest" realization—the differences between the accents are relatively small, words are pronounced without any special effort—can be found 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. Already in surrounding 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. Cf. preface by P. Ivić in reprint edition (1968) 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). Word and sentence prosody in Serbocroatian, by Ilse Lehiste and Pavle Ivić. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. The informal speech- slang in Belgrade has very special, neutralized accentuation (the oppositions falling/rising, short/long is only partly based on genuine word accents, far more on phonetic letter structure of the word).
Not only the stressed syllables can be short or long. Other syllables have that feature as well. In neo-shtokavian vernaculars, the unstressed long syllable (unstressed length) can occur only after the accented syllable (these lengths are usually called postaccent lengths. Their symbol is macron (-): dèvōjka (\'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.
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 by one syllable towards the beginning of the word, changing their quality to rising accents. For instance junâk (hero) became jùnāk. The old accents, logically remained only when they were on first syllable. 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 government tried to settle people from this poor mountainous 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 was the result:
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 morphologically 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.
Further in Serbian conjugation
Serbian verbs are conjugated in 4 past tenses - perfect, aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, of which the last two have a very limited use (imperfect is still used in some dialects, but majority of native Serbian speakers consider it archaic); 1 future tense (aka 1st future tense - as opposed to the 2nd future tense or the future exact, which is considered a tense of the conditional mood by some contemporary linguists), and 1 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 1st conditional (commonly used in conditional clauses, both for possible and impossible conditional clauses), and the 2nd conditional (without use in spoken language - it should be used for impossible conditional clauses). Serbian language has active and passive voice.
As for the non-finite verb forms, Serbian language has 1 infinitive, 2 adjectival participles (the active and the passive), and 2 adverbial participles (the present and the past).
| This short section requires expansion. |
The default word order is Subject-Verb-Object. However, since inflection in most cases uniquely determines the role within the sentence, Serbian is mostly a free word order language, and as such it is often cited[citation needed] by Noam Chomsky and other generative syntacticians.
In Serbian, the sentence "Grandfather is making brandy" can therefore be expressed in the following ways:
(Note that although in Serbian the verb also agrees with the subject in person and number, it is irrelevant in these examples since both the subject and the object are third person, singular.)
All six orders can be stressed in three ways - the first option stressing either WHO is making brandy (grandfather), WHAT is being made by grandfather (brandy), or WHAT is grandfather doing with/to the brandy (making it). However, although possible, some word orders may appear unnatural out of context.
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 tradition 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.
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| This short section requires expansion. |
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.
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.
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 etymological dictionaries for German, Italian, Dalmatian, Turkish, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, English and other loanwords (cf. chapter word origin).
Figures of speakers according to countries:
Serbian language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikibooks\' [[wikibooks:|]] has more about this subject:
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Category:Works originally in Serbian
| Slavic languages | |
|---|---|
| West Slavic | Czech · Kashubian · Knaanic† · Lower Sorbian · Pannonian Rusyn · Polabian† · Polish · Pomeranian† · Slovak · Slovincian† · Upper Sorbian |
| East Slavic | Belarusian · Old East Slavic† · Old Novgorod dialect† · Russian · Carpathian Rusyn · Ruthenian† · Ukrainian |
| South Slavic | Banat Bulgarian · Bulgarian · Church Slavonic · Macedonian · Old Church Slavonic† · Central South Slavic (Bosnian, Bunjevac, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Šokac) · Slavic (Greece) · Slovenian |
| Other | Proto-Slavic† · Russenorsk† · Slavoserbian† |
| (†) denotes Extinct | |
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