Serbian translation services

Serbian translation services Diskusija offers

Diskusija offers its clients professional Serbian translation services via cooperation with an ample team of trusted Serbian translators, carefully chosen based on their outstanding ability and dedication to quality. Their professionalism complements our own project managers’ diligence and expertise, ensuring your Serbian translation projects are brought to fruition with the best possible results.

We most frequently provide Serbian translation in these language pairs:

  • English to Serbian
  • German to Serbian
  • French to Serbian

If you need translation between Serbian and a language that’s not mentioned here, please get in touch and we’ll find a solution!

Serbian translation services

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About the Serbian language

The Serbian language (Cyrillic: српски, Latin: srpski) is a South Slavic language in the Indo-European family spoken in the Balkan region in Europe. It is an official language of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (along with Bosnian), and Kosovo.

There are approximately nine to ten million speakers of Serbian around the globe.

Serbian is closely related to the Croatian and Bosnian languages. They are all mutually intelligible and were formerly called Serbo-Croatian.

Serbian uses both Cyrillic and Latin based alphabets.

Modern language: alphabet, vocabulary, spelling, grammar

The differences between present-day Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian languages are similar to those existing between American, British and Australian English. All three languages share the same primary dialects.

Differences between these languages are found in vocabulary; they use different alphabets due to religious and cultural differences as the territories of Croats and Serbs came under different churches in the past. Although the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet are recognised officially, laws do not regulate their usage.

Serbian grammar is often referred to as Serbo-Croatian grammar. It uses three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), seven cases and two numbers. Serbian verbs of indicative mood are conjugated in four past forms: perfect, aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, one future tense, and one present tense. There are also the imperative, conditional and optative moods. The conditional mood has two more tenses, the first conditional, and the second conditional. Serbian verbs have active and passive voices.

Serbian (or Serbo-Croatian) verbs can be perfect, indicating an action that is completed or sudden, and imperfect – for lasting, habitual or repeated actions. This compensates for the lack of tenses, compared with the Germanic or Romance languages, because verbs already contain information about the action.

History of the Serbian language

The South Slavic branch, from which Serbian later separated, emerged after the resettlement of Slavs in Eastern Europe during the sixth century AD.

Literary Serbian is dated from the 12th century – there are several written works from that time. Significant literary Serbian works emerged during the Ottoman period in the mid-15th century.

In 1850, the Shtokavian dialect was established as a basis for a uniform literary language for Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. Towards the end of the 19th century, official grammar texts and dictionaries of the language, which was referred to as Serbo-Croatian, were published.

After World War I, in 1918 a single entity, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, was created. Because of attempts to introduce a uniform language throughout all the territory of the Kingdom, Serbian and Croatian were officially forged into a single language.

In 1946, the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia was established and in 1954, under the Novi Sad Agreement, Serbo-Croatian was declared as the official language. It remained in force until 1991 when the Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia disintegrated.

The war, which followed the collapse of the federal republic, had an influence on the languages – the sense of nationalism in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia inspired people to emphasise the differences between their languages.

Serbs made attempts to purify their language by replacing words of Bosnian and Croatian origin with new Serbian ones.

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