standardSerbian

Standard Serbian (Serbian: standardni srpski jezik) is the standardized variety of the Serbian language used in formal communication, education, media and literature. It is based primarily on the Eastern Herzegovinian subdialect of Neo-Shtokavian speech, which serves as the common foundation of several standard varieties of the former Serbo-Croatian diasystem.

The modern standard emerged in the 19th century through language reform and codification efforts associated with Vuk Karadžić and later grammarians and lexicographers. It continued to develop through 20th-century scholarly work and institutional regulation. Standard Serbian shares a high degree of mutual intelligibility with standard Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, while differing in certain phonological, lexical and orthographic norms.

Standard Serbian is characterized by a largely phonemic orthography, a rich inflectional morphology, and a SVO word order in unmarked contexts. It is written in both Cyrillic and Latin scripts; Cyrillic is constitutionally emphasized as the official script of Serbia, while the Latin alphabet is widely used in everyday contexts and media. Language institutions, academic bodies and publishers provide prescriptive guidelines for spelling, grammar and vocabulary.

As a national standard, it functions in government, education and public life in Serbia and among Serbian-speaking communities abroad, while coexisting with regional dialects and other standardized varieties in the Western Balkans.