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Serbo-Croatian[sUr´bO-krOA´shun] Pronunciation Key, language belonging to the South Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages). Although it is actually one language, Serbo-Croatian is designated as Serbian when spoken by Serbs (mostly belonging to the Orthodox Eastern Church) and written in a form of the Cyrillic alphabet, but as Croatian when spoken by Croats (mostly Roman Catholics) and written in a modified version of the Roman alphabet. This divergence in writing is the principal difference between the Serbian and Croatian versions of Serbo-Croatian. It is the native tongue of more than 18 million people in present-day Serbia and Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia and Hercegovina. Serbo-Croatian is not spoken to any extent outside these countries.
A feature that sets Serbo-Croatian apart from other Slavic languages is its use of musical pitch or intonation. It possesses four kinds of musical accent: two rising inflections, one long and one short, and two falling inflections, one long and one short. This musical intonation apparently reflects the earlier Indo-European pitch accent. Grammatically, Serbo-Croatian resembles Polish.
The oldest extant texts in Serbo-Croatian date from the 12th cent. For a number of centuries the literary language of the Serbs was a variant of Church Slavonic, and in Catholic Croatia it was usually Latin, although in the 13th cent. the Croats began to write down their spoken language. In the 19th cent. the Serbian philologist Vuk StefanovIc Karadzic, through his writings and efforts, accomplished several major linguistic reforms. The most important one instituted the spoken tongue as the basis of the literary language. Karadzic also worked for a more phonetic spelling and consequently for a revision of the alphabet to that end. See also Yugoslav (South Slav) Literature.
See grammars by M. Partridge (1964) and O. Grozdic (1969).
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