Serbian language is a lot like English, not in the sense of vocabulary, grammar or structure, but because it is a polycentric language. Much in the way that Americans, the British, and Australians all speak differing forms of the same language, Serbian is one of the standardised varieties of the larger Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, which is essentially the same basic language with a slightly different pronunciation, spelling, or added regional vocabulary.
Unlike most other languages, written Serbian is considered a synchronic digraphia. What this means is that, beyond personal preferences, Serbian can be nearly universally understood whether it is written in Latin script or Cyrillic. Interestingly, though there is no difference in the words, a 2014 survey showed that 47% used the Latin script, while 36% tended to prefer the Cyrillic script.
When we think of the word vampire, it is natural to conjure images of well-dressed creatures of the night in Transylvanian castles, but the word itself is actually Serbian. First described in the report of the Austrian Imperial Provisor Frombald, which speaks of the death of a Serbian peasant, Petar Blagojević, in 1725, followed by the mysterious deaths of another 9 local people within the next 8 days. After the body was exhumed, staked through the heart and burned, the mysterious deaths suddenly stopped. Regardless of what actually happened, this story was widely propagated by the Austrian press along with the Serbian word for what Petar had become.
Though Serbian has gone through several periods of standardisation based on the vernacular, it started out as Old Church Slavonic based on the Glagolitic alphabet created by St. Cyril and St. Melodius for the Christianisation of the Slavs. Several centuries later, as distinct dialects began to emerge, the Shtokavian dialect came out as dominant in Serbia. Later the dialects which had separated began to, again, intermingle due to the Great Migrations of the Serbs during the 16th–18th century.
Much like the language origin, the first known work essentially depends on how you classify the Serbian language itself. For example, if you consider the Glagolitic script to be the first proto-Serbian script, then the first known work is the Humac tablet, which dates from circa 11th century and whose inscription contains five Glagolitic letters among the Bosnian Cyrillic. However, taking the Shtokavian dialect as being standardised Serbian, it can correctly be said that the first work was a governmental text – the Charter of Ban Kulin of 1189, while the first uses of Shtokavian in a vernacular sense occurred circa 1400.
And to end up with a colourful saying from the Serbian language – nobody in Serbia is crazy, ridiculous, or irrational, they are just turtles. When someone is acting in the aforementioned ways, a common light-hearted joke in Serbian is ti si kornjaca, which means ‘you are a turtle,’ considering that turtles are very rare in Serbia.
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