Serbian

How to spell serbian

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce serbian

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does serbian mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to Serbia, its people, culture, or language.
2. nounA native or inhabitant of Serbia, or the Slavic language spoken there.

Serbian in a sentence

• adjective

  The museum displayed traditional serbian folk costumes from the nineteenth century.

• noun

  As a fluent serbian speaker, he translated the legal documents for the firm.

• adjective

  She studied serbian history during her semester abroad in Belgrade.

• noun

  The delegation included two serbian representatives from the trade ministry.

Where does serbian come from?

Language of origin: Other

This word is built from Serb, the name of the South Slavic people of the Balkans, joined to the English suffix -ian, which marks a person or thing belonging to a place. The name Serb itself comes from the Serbian and broader Slavic ethnonym Srbin, whose deeper origin is debated; many scholars connect it to an old Slavic root suggesting kinship or an allied people, though the explanation is far from certain. The country name Serbia reached English through Latin and the diplomatic languages of Europe, with the spelling settling on the Latinised stem Serb-. English then formed Serbian in the usual way it makes adjectives of nationality, exactly as it produced Russian, Bulgarian, and Albanian. The single spelling trap is the unstressed middle vowel: the ending sounds like '-bee-an' but is written -bian, so writers must remember the i before the a.

How the word is built

• Serb (the people and the country Serbia)
• -ian (adjective and noun suffix meaning 'belonging to' or 'native of')