Serbian (srpski) is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Serbs. t 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), which is also the basis of standard Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin varieties and therefore the Declaration on the Common Language of Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Montenegrins was issued in 2017. 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, 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.
Classification
Serbian is a standardized variety of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language (Indo-European), of the South Slavic subgroup. Other standardized forms of Serbo-Croatian are Bosnian, Croatian, and Montenegrin. “An examination of all the major ‘levels’ of language shows that BCS is clearly a single language with a single grammatical system.”
Geographic distribution
Serbia: 6,540,699 (official language)
Bosnia and Herzegovina: 1,086,027 (co-official language)
Germany: 568,240
Austria: 350,000
Montenegro: 265,890 (language in official use)
Switzerland: 186,000
United States: 172,874
Sweden: 120,000
Italy: 106,498
Kosovo: est. 70,000 – 100,000 (co-official language)
Canada: 72,690
Australia: 55,114
Croatia: 52,879 (recognized minority language)
Slovenia: 38,964
North Macedonia: 24,773 (recognized minority language)
Romania: 22,518 (recognized minority language)
Status in Montenegro
Serbian was the official language of Montenegro until October 2007 when the new Constitution of Montenegro replaced the Constitution of 1992. Amid opposition from pro-Serbian parties, Montenegrin was made the sole official language of the country, and Serbian was given the status of a language in official use along with Bosnian, Albanian, and Croatian. In the 2011 Montenegrin census, 42.88% declared Serbian to be their native language, while Montenegrin was declared by 36.97% of the population.
Dialects
The dialects of Serbo-Croatian, regarded Serbian (traditionally spoken in Serbia), include:
• Šumadija–Vojvodina (Ekavian, Neo-Shtokavian): central and northern Serbia
• Eastern Herzegovinian (Ijekavian, Neo-Shtokavian): southwestern Serbia, western half of Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia
• Kosovo–Resava (Ekavian, Old-Shtokavian): eastern central Serbia, central Kosovo
• Smederevo–Vršac (Ekavian, Old-Shtokavian): east-central Serbia
• Prizren–Timok (transitional Torlakian): southeastern Serbia, southern Kosovo
• Zeta–Raška (Ijekavian, Old-Shtokavian): eastern half of Montenegro, southwestern Serbia
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