Serbian phrasebook

Serbian (српски / srpski) is the official and main language of Serbia and Montenegro. It is also an official language of Bosnia and Kosovo. Barring a few vocabulary differences, it is almost identical to the Bosnian, Croatian and Montenegrin languages. You can use any of the phrasebooks mentioned and get along with it in either Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia or Montenegro (during the period of common state of Yugoslavia these languages were known as Serbo-Croatian). Serbian is written mostly in Cyrillic in Serbia, Bosnia (Serb Rep.) and Kosovo. However in Montenegro the Latin alphabet is almost always used. There are also Serbian minority speakers in portions of southern and eastern Croatia. Germany and Austria also have large Serbian minority populations in major cities.

Like in all other Balto-Slavic languages (except Bulgarian and Macedonian), pronouns, adjectives and nouns in Serbian are declined through cases. For example kuća, kuće, kući, etc. mean 'house', 'of the house', 'to the house', etc. However, tenses are simpler than in English - there is no difference between "I go" and "I'm going" or "I saw" and "I have seen". While an English speaker will express himself correctly only by saying, "I was drinking when you came", both verbs of this sentence could be translated by any of Serbian past tenses and still be correct. Note that Serbian makes a distinction between the polite "you" pronoun, "vi", and informal "ti" (analogous to "vous" and "tu" in French, and "Sie" and "du" in German). Serbian has no articles and the difference between "a house" and "the house" is understood from context and noun declensions.

The most common word order is SVO (subject-verb-object).