Around twenty five million ex-Yugoslavs understand Serbian, and twelve million speak it. Before the break-up of Yugoslavia, the language was known as Serbocroatian or, less commonly, as Croatoserbian. Political considerations and nationalist aspirations have done much to bring the differences between Serbian and Croatian to the foreground, and there are very few scholars left who treat these languages as if they were merely dialects of the same native tongue. Although it is often not easy to specify systematically how the two languages differ, the prevailing political and educational currents treat them as separate entities.
The Serbian language is spoken in Serbia, as well as in other countries created out of pre-1991 Yugoslavia. Different Serbian dialects are used in different regions. For example, Cakavian dialects are spoken along the Adriatic cost and on some of the islands, while the Kajkavian dialect is used along the area between Croatia and Slovenia. Serbian speakers in other areas east of the Drina river use the Ijekavian dialect, while Ekavski dialect can be heard to the west.
As mentioned above, Serbian is also very similar to Croatian. However, the two languages differ in terms of certain pronunciations, some basic vocabulary, and the alphabet they are written in, among other things.
The official Serbian alphabet is a Cyrillic alphabet, similar to the alphabet used in Russian but not identical. There are thirty letters in the Serbian alphabet. Each letter of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet corresponds to a single sound, which makes Serbian spelling comparatively easy. Most educated Serbian speakers are also familiar with the Latin alphabet, but they tend to prefer the Cyrillic one.
Serbian is a southern Slavonic language, and as such has many words with native Slavic roots. However, one feature that distinguishes Serbian from Croatian is Serbian's greater willingness to take in loan words from other languages. Historically, Serbian borrowed words from Greek and Latin, while more recently, it has taken in words of French and English origin.
Like other Slavic languages, Serbian groups its nouns into one of three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. People, places, things, and ideas will have their respective gender, case, and number reflected by the word endings. A fairly safe assumption is that masculine nouns will end in consonants, feminine nouns will end in -a (or occasionally -t), and neuter nouns will end in -o or -e. Adjectives take on the case, number, and gender of the nouns they modify.
Most of the time, Serbian verbs function like English verbs. The key difference is aspect, which refers to the degree of completion of the action the verb describes. As a result, each Serbian verb is usually part of a binary pair: perfective verbs describe actions that have already been completed in the past or actions that will be completed in the future, while imperfective verbs describe ongoing actions. Fine shades of difference in meaning may be generated based on the prefixes used by the perfective form.
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