Serbian voice overs: what you need to know

Serbian is a South Slavic language, spoken mostly in Serbia, Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina where it’s the official language. Around 8 million people are native Serbian speakers and additionally, less than 1 million people speak Serbian as a second language.

Serbian is a rather widely spoken language in the Balkan peninsula. There are many Serbian speakers in Montenegro, Croatia, North Macedonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

Language History

Serbian history follows the same footsteps as its relative — the Serbo-Croatian language. Serbian developed from Old Church Slavonic — an ancient liturgical language that was used in Slavic territories since the 9th century.

As an autonomous language that differed from Old Church Slavonic, Serbian emerged around the 11th century. Around this time, the first written texts in Serbo-Croatian appeared.

Things get tricky when we get to modern times. The contemporary Serbian language has been shaped by historical events and conflicts in the Balkan region. During the period of Yugoslavia (1918-1992), Serbian was the official language of the unified Balkan countries.

After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, all Balkan states established their own official languages. The problem? Well, they’re all very similar and mutually intelligible. Just have different names.

There are many issues surrounding the Serbo-Croatian language’s official status — mostly because of the complex relationships between countries in the Balkan region.

Close Relations

Because of the same Serbo-Croatian language family, Serbian is very closely related to other languages in this language group — Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrian.

In fact, all Serbo-Croatian language varieties are mutually intelligible. A Serbian speaker won’t have any problems understanding a Croatian, Bosnian, or Montenegrian speaker.

However, all four language varieties share some differences, mostly in their vocabularies. The biggest part of Serbian vocabulary is of Slavic origin. However, it also has quite a few borrowings from other languages. Loanwords of Turkish, Latin, German, French, and Russian are common in the Serbian lexis.

Serbian is quite liberal in terms of borrowing words from other languages even today. Serbian has borrowed many words related to culture, media, and lifestyle from English.

Accents and Voice Over Tips

Since Serbian is technically a standardized variety of Serbo-Croatian, things get tricky when we discuss Serbian dialects. On one hand, Serbo-Croatian has three major dialects: Chakavian, Shtokavian, and Kaikavian. Nonetheless, Serbian has its own regional dialects that are spoken in Serbia.

When recording a Serbian voice over, it’s crucial to understand how similar the language is to Croatian, Montenegrian, and Bosnian. After all, they’re all mutually intelligible!

So how does Serbian differ from other Serbo-Croatian varieties? First of all, Serbians tend to use the -ovati suffix while Croatian, for example, uses -irati. There are quite a few differences in vocabulary, too. Most notably, Serbians use Westernized names for months — for example, ‘April’ (Serbian) and ‘travanj’ (Croatian).

All in all, subtle differences, in this case, really make the language!

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