Serbian language
Serbian (српски / srpski, pronounced [sr̩̂pskiː]) is the standardized variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Serbs. It 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.
| Serbian | |
|---|---|
| српски језик / srpski jezik | |
| Pronunciation | [sr̩̂pskiː] |
| Native to | Serbia Bosnia and Herzegovina Montenegro Kosovo |
| Region | Southeastern Europe |
| Ethnicity | Serbs |
Native speakers | c. 12 million (2009) |
| Official status | |
Official language in |
|
Recognised minority language in | |
| Regulated by | Board for Standardization of the Serbian Language |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | sr |
| ISO 639-2 | srp |
| ISO 639-3 | srp |
| Glottolog | serb1264 |
| Linguasphere | part of 53-AAA-g |
Countries/regions where Serbian is an official language.
Countries/regions where it is recognized as a minority language. | |
Serbian is not endangered according to the classification system of the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger | |
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.