| Group | Slavic (with Russian, Polish etc.), Southern branch (with Macedonian, Slovene, Bulgarian). |
| Geography | In Yugoslavia, it is called Serbian; in Croatia, it is Croatian. The total number of speakers equals to 17 million people living in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, USA, and Australia. In fact, the difference between the speech of Serbs and Croats is the difference between the three dialectal groups: Shtokav, Kajkav, Chakav (based on the reflex of the Slavic pronoun 'what'). |
| History | The most ancient documents date back to the 12th century: the Glagolitic Bashchan inscription was made in about 1100, the first document in Cyrillic - in 1189. The modern language of literature was formed in the 19th century on the basis of the Shtokav dialect by the two famous Slavic linguists - Croat Ludevit Gaj and Serb Vuk Karadzic. |
| Phonetics | There are long and short vowels; the sound [r] can also be a vowel. The stress is tonic. Of 25 consonants, 20 are hard, 5 are always short. |
| Nominal Morphology | Different from other South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Macedonian), Serbo-Croatian declines its nouns in up to six cases. |
| Verbal Morphology | The verb has a complex system of conjugated forms including four sets of simple and complex past tenses, two future tenses. The infinitive is in use, but is often replaced by a construction with a particle and a present tense form. |
| Lexicon | The dialects of Croatia use a great number of borrowed words from German and Italian. |
| Writing | Glagolitic alphabet (Old Serbo-Croatian), Cyrillic alphabet (Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Hercegovina), Latin alphabet (Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia, USA) |
| Close Contacts | Serbo-Croatian is situated in the region with numerous languages which have been spoken here for ages: Slavic (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovene), Romance (Romanian, Dalmatian, Italian, Istro-Romanian), Albanian, Greek, Hungarian. |
| Sample | Drugove, hteo bih da danas porazgovaramo o temi: koji su osnovni
zadaci Saveza comunistiДЌke omladine i, u vezi s time, kakve treba da budu
organizacije omladine u socialistiДЌkoj republici uopЕЎte.
Secondly, I would like to speak about the topic: which the principal objectives of the Communist Youth Unity are, and together with this, what the requirements for the youth organization in the socialist republic are. (V.Lenin, 1920.) |
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