Serbian Language - Classification

Classification

Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language (Indo-European), of the South Slavic subgroup. Serbo-Croatian consists of Serbian along with Bosnian, Croatian, and Montenegrin. It has lower intelligibility with the East South Slavic languages Bulgarian and Macedonian, than with Slovene (although Slovene is part of the West subgroup, it is hindered by differences in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation to the Serbo-Croatian standard forms, and is closer to the Serbo-Croatian Kajkavian and Čakavian dialects).

The South Slavic languages all derive their forms from Old Church Slavonic, with Serbian emerging from Old Serbian (Serbian-Slavonic), which has a literary history from the 10th century.