Serbian Language
Serbian (Serbian Cyrillic: српски, Latin: srpski, ) is a standardized register of the Serbo-Croatian language spoken by Serbs, mainly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and Macedonia. It is official in Serbia and one of the official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is the principal language of the Serbs.
The dialect serving as the basis for the main literary and standard language is Shtokavian, which is also the basis of standard Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. In particular, Serbian is standardized around Šumadija-Vojvodina and Eastern Herzegovinian subdialects of Shtokavian. The Torlakian dialect of Serbian is spoken in southeast Serbia, and is not standardized, as it represents transitional form to Macedonian and Bulgarian.
Serbo-Croatian is the only European language with active digraphia, using both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. The Bosnian and Serbian varieties use both alphabets while the Croatian variety uses only the Latin alphabet. The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was devised in 1814 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić, who created the alphabet on phonemic principles. The Latin alphabet was designed by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1830.
Read more about Serbian Language: Classification, Geographic Distribution, Writing System, Vocabulary, Serbian Literature, Dictionaries
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the language he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader’s eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.”
—J. David Bolter (b. 1951)