Serbian language

Serbian is the standard variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Serbs. It is the national official language and literary standard of Serbia, one of the official languages in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, and a recognized minority language in numerous countries.

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.