Serbian (Serbian Cyrillic: српски, Latin: srpski, pronounced [sr̩̂pskiː]) is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language used chiefly by Serbs in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In addition, it is a recognized minority language in Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Albania and Greece.

Linguistics

Serbian is an Slavic language and, as such, is closely related to Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin (and is often considered the same language), as well as Russian and Slovenian. It is more distantly related to English, Hindi and Ancient Hittite.

Classification

Indo-European > Balto-Slavic > Slavic > South Slavic > Western > Serbo-Croatian > Serbiana

Morphophonemics

Serbian has five vowel phonemes, /a, e, i, o, u/, which are also distinguished on length, giving a total of 10 phonemic vowel contrasts. The consonant system of Serbo-Croatian has 25 phonemes. One peculiarity is a presence of both post-alveolar and palatal affricates, but a lack of corresponding palatal fricatives. Unlike most other Slavic languages such as Russian, there is no palatalized versus non-palatalized (hard–soft) contrast for most consonants.

Morphology and Syntax

Serbian is a highly inflected language, with grammatical morphology for nouns, pronouns and adjectives as well as verbs. Serbian nouns are classified into three declensional types, denoted largely by their nominative case endings as "-a" type, "-i" and "-e" type. Into each of these declensional types may fall nouns of any of three genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. Each noun may be inflected to represent the noun's grammatical case, of which Serbian has seven: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental and locative. Nouns are further inflected to represent the noun's number, singular or plural.

Pronouns, when used, are inflected along the same case and number morphology as nouns. Serbian is a pro-drop language, meaning that pronouns may be omitted from a sentence when their meaning is easily inferred from the text. In cases where pronouns may be dropped, they may also be used to add emphasis.

Serbian verbs are conjugated in four past forms—perfect, aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect—of which the last two have a very limited use (imperfect is still used in some dialects, but the majority of native Serbian speakers consider it archaic), one future tense (also known as the first future tense, as opposed to the second future tense or the future exact, which is considered a tense of the conditional mood by some contemporary linguists), and one 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 first conditional (commonly used in conditional clauses, both for possible and impossible conditional clauses) and the second conditional (without use in the spoken language—it should be used for impossible conditional clauses). Serbian has active and passive voice.

As for the non-finite verb forms, Serbian has one infinitive, two adjectival participles (the active and the passive), and two adverbial participles (the present and the past).

Orthography

Standard Serbian language uses both Cyrillic (ћирилица, ćirilica) and Latin script (latinica, латиница). Serbian is a rare example of synchronic digraphia, a situation where all literate members of a society have two interchangeable writing systems available to them. Media and publishers typically select one alphabet or the other. Although standard Serbian uses both scripts, the Cyrillic script is the current official script of the language in Serbia.

Written sample

Sjeverni ledeni vjetar i Sunce su se prepirali o svojoj snazi.

Spoken samples

Djokovic press conference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvX5Hxy4Zys)

Lullaby (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3fdqj1P3Ns)

Sources & Further reading

Wikipedia articles on Serbian

What now?

This thread is foremost a place for discussion. Are you a native speaker? Share your culture with us. Learning the language? Tell us why you chose it and what you like about it. Thinking of learning? Ask a native a question. Interested in linguistics? Tell us what's interesting about it, or ask other people. Discussion is week-long, so don't worry about post age, as long as it's this week's language.

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