Serbian is a South Slavic language, spoken chiefly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and in the Serbian diaspora. Standard Serbian is based on the Shtokavian dialect, like the modern Croatian and Bosnian, with which it is mutually intelligible, and was previously unified with under the standard known as Serbo-Croatian. It counts among the official (and minority) languages of Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, Romania, Republic of Macedonia and Hungary. The alphabet used to write Serbian is a variation on the Cyrillic alphabet, that was devised by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. The Serbian Latin alphabet is based on Ljudevit Gaj's reform. Serbian is an example of synchronic digraphia. Both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are widely used in Serbia in a large variety of contexts, and most people are literate in both scripts. Serbian orthography is very consistent: it is an approximation of the principle "one letter per sound". This principle is represented by Adelung's saying, "Write as you speak and read as it is written", the principle used by Vuk Karadžić when reforming the Cyrillic orthography of Serbian in the 19th century. Most of the European linguists from outside the Balkans regard still scientifically the Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin languages as just one language — the Serbo-Croatian.

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