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Serbian language

Standard variety of Serbo-Croatian

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Serbian is based on the most widespread supradialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian (more specifically on the dialects of Šumadija-Vojvodina and Eastern Herzegovina), 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 (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

At the very end of the Middle Ages and the start of the early Modern Period, in the second half of the 15th century — right after Serbia became a part of the Ottoman Empire — Serbian was used as one of the four imperially important languages in the Arabic-Persian-Greek-Serbian Conversation Textbook, a phrasal dictionary in two volumes, one just under and the other just over 100 pages long.

Early modern period

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 first 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.

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