Serbian originated from old Slavic whose contemporary daughter languages are distinguished by their geographical location. Russian and Ukrainian, among others, belong to the Eastern Slavic language group, Polish, Slovakian, Sorbian and Czech to the Western Slavic group. Serbian belongs along side Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian to the Southern Slavic languages. The Slavic languages are a sub-group of the Indo-European language family and are natively spoken by around 300 million people.
Serbian is closely related to the Croatian and Bosnian languages. The speakers of these languages can consequently, as a rule, understand one another without problems.
Differences are above all found in vocabulary and spelling: Croats and Bosnians write in Latin script, whereas Cyrillic script as well as the Latin alphabet are used in Serbia.
In official Serbian writing and in schools Cyrillic script is the standard. In daily use and in some newspapers, you can also read the Latin spelling. In total, Cyrillic spelling is the dominant script.
In order to learn the Serbian language, it is necessary to master Cyrillic. In the event that you have already learned Cyrillic script through another Slavic language, it would certainly interest you to know that Serbian Cyrillic script has several additional letters that don't exist in other Cyrillic scripts. These are necessary in order to be able to reproduce the sounds of the Serbian language.
It is currently estimated that Serbian is spoken by some twelve million people worldwide. A large portion of Serbian native speakers live in Serbia. Naturally, Serbian is the official language there. In Montenegro a variant of Serbian is spoken called Montenegrin. Serbian is also an official language in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as in Croatia, in Kosovo, in Macedonia and in Romania. Sizable Serbian speaking populations are above all present in the United States and western Europe.
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