| Serbian Language |
Article Index for Serbian |
Shopping Serbian |
Website Links For Serbian |
Information AboutSerbian Language |
Serbian (; ) is one of the standard versions of the Shtokavian Dialect , used primarily in Serbia , Bosnia And Herzegovina , Montenegro , Croatia , and by Serbs in the Serbian Diaspora . The former standard is known as Serbo-Croatian , now split into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian standards. Two on the Cyrillic Alphabet , devised by Vuk Karadžić , and a Variation on the Latin Alphabet , devised by Ljudevit Gaj . The characters of the two alphabets map to each other one-to-one. Serbian orthography is very consistent: approximation of the principle "one letter per sound". This principle is represented by Adelung 's saying, "Write as you speak and read as it is written", the principle used by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić when reforming the Cyrillic orthography of Serbian in the 19th century. Standard Serbian is based on the Štokavian dialect. The ''Ekavian'' variant is spoken mostly in Serbia and ''Ijekavian'' in Bosnia And Herzegovina , Montenegro , south-western Serbia , and Croatia . The base for is the Ijekavian dialect is East-Herzegovinian, and of the Ekavian, the Šumadija-Vojvodina dialect. Features of other Shtokavian dialects, as well of the Torlakian dialect, which is spoken in southern Serbia, are not accepted as standard. WRITING SYSTEMS "Srpske narodne pjesme" (Serbian folk poems), Vienna , 1841 ]] Serbian language can be written in two different alphabets: Serbian Cyrillic Script (ћирилица) and the Serbian Latin (''latinica''). The Sort Order of the two alphabets is different.
Use of scripts Cyrillic alphabet was in exclusive use in Serbia before the was widely accepted (before the Yugoslav Wars ), the Cyrillic alphabet was used predominantly in Central Serbia and in Montenegro (until the late 1990s). The Latin alphabet was preferred in Croatia and the only one used by the Croats. In Belgrade , the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina and in Bosnia And Herzegovina and in the larger more vibrant towns of Serbia , either alphabet would be used as and how the writer would choose. The exact percentage of use of alphabets is difficult to assess today. Of the major newspapers, '' Politika '', '' Večernje Novosti '', '' Glas Javnosti '', and '' Dnevnik '' are printed in Cyrillic, while '' Blic '', '' Kurir '', '' Danas '' and '' Press '' use Latin. Of the major TV outlets, only the public service Radio Television Of Serbia uses primarily Cyrillic (as well as former BK TV ), while Pink , B92 and most others use Latin. An informal poll on the Internet forum Serbian Cafe showed no apparent preference.1 According to the data collected by ''Association for Protection of Cyrillic'', over 80% of public inscriptions in Novi Sad is in Latin, and over 60% in Belgrade; 5/6 of (randomly sampled) magazines is in Latin, as well as vast majority of university textbooks (however, the proportion is the opposite for high-school ones).2 Many E-mail and even web documents written in Serbian use basic ASCII , where Serbian Latin letters that use Diacritic s (Ž Ć Č Š) are either replaced with the base, undiacritised forms (Z C C S) or with two letter combinations that are pronounced similarly (Zh, Tj, Ch, Sh), letter Đ is replaced with Dj, and Dž with Dz. The original words are then recognized from the context. This is not an official alphabet, and is considered bad practice, but there are some documents in Serbian that use this simplified alphabet. This is common practice in other languages that use letters with diacritics. Equivalence of scripts The Cyrillic letters /Љ/, /Њ/ and /Џ/ are represented by or Medical Injection ) and /његов/ (''his'') are written with "'''nj'''" in Latin form. Thus, automatic transliteration of Cyrillic text to Latin is straightforward, but automatic transliteration of Latin text to Cyrillic requires additional heuristic rules. PHONOLOGY Vowels The Serbian Vowel system is simple, with only five vowels. All vowels are Monophthong s. The oral vowels are as follows: Consonant-Vowel Interactions in Serbian: Features, Representations and Constraint Interactions , Bruce Morén, Center for Advanced Study of Theoretical Linguistics, Tromsø, 2005 Consonants The Consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of Affricate and Palatal consonants. As in English, voicedness is Phonemic , but Aspiration is not. The consonant phoneme table for Serbian is as follows (corresponding Latin letters are below the IPA symbols) |
|
|