Interesting facts about the language

Serbian evolved from Old Slavic, whose daughter languages are now classified according to their geographical location. The East Slavic group includes Russian and Ukrainian, among others; the West Slavic languages include Polish, Slovak, Sorbian, and Czech. Serbian, along with Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian, is one of the South Slavic languages.

The Slavic languages are a subgroup of the Indo-European language family and are spoken as native languages by around 300 million people. Serbian is closely related to Croatian and Bosnian. Speakers of these languages can therefore generally understand each other without difficulty. However, differences can be found primarily in vocabulary and in the different spellings: Croats and Bosnians write in the Latin script, while Serbia uses both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. In official Serbian writing and in schools, the Cyrillic script is considered standard, but you will also see Latin script in everyday use and in some newspapers. Overall, however, the Cyrillic script clearly predominates.

According to current estimates, the Serbian language is spoken by up to twelve million people worldwide, the majority of whom live in Serbia is spoken there, where it is also the official language. In Montenegro, a variant of Serbian is spoken, known as Montenegrin. Serbian is also an official language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as regionally in Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania. Larger Serbian-speaking populations also exist, particularly in the United States and Western Europe. It is estimated that in the Federal Republic of Germany alone, around 500,000 people speak Serbian as their native language.