.

,jJ':1

5"1

'

.,.

region, upper Walio (Leonhard Schultze) River. A few alsonear Akiapmin south of the Central Range.

Walio: 145 speakers in East Sepik Province.Watakataui: also called Waxe. 350 speakers in East Sepik

Province, on a branch of the middle Korosameri River, two

villages. The people are highly bilingual in Tok Pisin.Watam: also called Marangis. 380 speakers in Madang and

East Sepik Provinces, near the mouth of the Ramu River.Wogamusin: also called Wongamusin. 700 speakers in East

Sepik Province, Ambunti district, four villages. Many Tok

PisiI~ sR..eakers.Some young people learning English.Yau1:8i5 speakers in East Sepik Province. Related languages:

Langam, Mongol.Yawiyo: also called Yabio. 100 speakers in Sandaun Province,

10 miles east of Duranmin, three villages. 7% lexical simi-lariry- with Papi. Most use Saniyo-Hiyowe as seCond lan-guage.

Yelogu: also called Kaunga, Buiamanambu. 230 speakers inEast Sepik Province, one village in Ambunti district.

Yerakai: also called Yerekai. 390 speakers in East SepikProvince, Ambunti district, southeast near government_sta-

~.: "-::~~. :~~=:.-,c_' '-

"YeSsal1~Mayo: also called Mayo-Yesan, Maio-Yesan, Yasyin,Yesan;', 1;600 speakers in East Sepik Province, 'Ambuntidistrict; Sandaun Province, Wan Wan division, south of

Mehek, ten villages. Dialects are Yawu (Yau, Yaw,Warasai),Mayo- Yessan.

Yetfa: 'also called Biksi, Biaksi, Inisine. 1,200 speakers inPapua, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. In Papua, Indo-nesia: 1,000 speakers in Jayawijaya kabupaten, Okbibabkecamatan, border area east and north of the Sogber River,many villages south of Gunung. Yetfa and Biksi are twoethnic groups, speaking the same language. Trade languagein the area, extending to Papua New Guinea border. In PapuaNew Guinea: 200 speakers south of the Green River, andinto Papua.

Yimas: 300 speakers in East Sepik Province, near Chambri,Arafundi River, middle Karawari River. Related language:Karawari. B. GRIMES

SERBO-CROATIAN. This South Slavic language hasmultiple standardized forms; it is most closely related toSlovenian, and less closely related to Bulgarian andMacedonian. Of the succe~sor states to 1945-1991Yugoslavia, Croatian uses standard Croatian, Serbiaand Montenegro use standard Serbian, and Bosnia-Hercegovina employs standard Bosnian and the other twoas well. Speakers total over seventeen million. For stan-dard references, see Meillet and Vaillant 1969, Naylor1980, Browne 1993, and Kordic 1997.

SERBO-CROA TIAN 47

There are three main dialect groups: Cakavian andKajkavian are now spoken in relatively small areas, inthe west and north of Croatia, respectively, while Stoka-vian predominates elsewhere. Its three subdialects, Ika-vian, Ekavian, and Ijekavian, are named according totheir treatment of the Common Slavic vowel *e; thus the

word 'child' is dite, ,dete, and dijete, respectively. (Inshort syllables, the Ijek. reflex isje: gdje 'where'.) Ikavianis found mainly in western regions; Ekavian in most ofSerbia; and Ijekavian in the western part of 'Serbia,Montenegro, most of Bosnia and Hercegovina, arid'muchof Croatia. Ekavian is the basis of standard Serbian, withBelgrade as its center (older term: "eastern variant ofSerbo-Croatian"), though some writers and many Mon-tenegrins write Serbian using Ijekavian spellings.-Serbiantraditionally prefers Cyrillic script, but the Latin alphabetis now frequently used as well. Ijekavian is the foundationof standard Croatian, whose focal point is Zagreb (olderterm: "western variant"), and also of standard Bosnian.

Croatian and Bosnian use Latin sqript almost exclllsivety:-""The standards differ too in iexis: different wordsaretised

'for some everyday items, and in scholarly vocabuIary.There are fewer borrowings in Croatian, predominantlyfrom German, Latin, and Czech, and correspondinglymore calques and neologisms. Borrowing is more com-mon in Serbian and Bosnian, from Turkish, Greek, Rus-sian, Church Slavic, and recently also from French andEnglish. Most of the differences are a matter of frequencyof usage. The status of the standards has, since around1900, been sensitive, because of the cultural and politicalimplications. Shared features and the ease of mutualcomprehension suggest one language with two mainvarieties, but since 1991 few advocate a joint standard,and the very term "Serbo-Croatian" is disfavored. Thisarticle presents Ijekavian (standard Croatian and Bosnian)and Ekavian (Serbian) in the Latin alphabet.

1. Writing system. The original Church Slavic alpha-bet was Glagolitic (9th century). Eastern Orthodox Slav-dom, including Serbia, adopted the later' Cyrillic forchurch as well as the first vernacular documents (12thcentury on). In Catholic Croatia, Glagolitic survived, butLatin script gradually prevailed (14th-19th centuries).Bosnia has used Cyrillic (graphically modified), Latin,and Arabic letters. In his Serbian dictionary of 1818, VukKaradzic (1787-1864) introduced a simplified version ofCyrillic, which was finally adopted despite great initialopposition. The equivalent reform for the Latin alphabetwas carried out slightly later by Ljudevit Gaj (1809-

48 SERBO-CROA TIAN

TABLE 1. The Alphabets of Serbo-Croatian

1872); both these men had a major influence on thedevelopment of the literary language. The modem alpha-bets are given together in Table 1, in the Latin order; theCyrillic order is A, E, B, r, ,n;,n, E, )K, 3, H, J, K, n,Th, M, H, lb, 0, n, P, C, T, n, Y, <P,X, U;, q, U, Ill.The exact correspondence between the two alphabetsmakes transliteration automatic; spelling follows pronun-ciation with unusual consistency.

2. Phonology. Serbo-Croatian's inventory of segmen-tal phonemes is small by Slavic standards (cf. Gvozda-novi6 1980); It has twenty-five consonants, shown inTabk 2;]; which js trilled, can be syllabic, as in trg

'square':TIicaddition, there is a straightforward five-vowelsystem,)~e a 0 u. Vowels are long or short; one vowel ina word is accented, with either a rising or a falling tone

TABLE 3. Serbo-Croatian Accentuation

Long ShortAccented Syllables

Falling ToneRising Tone

Unaccented Syllables

-VVV

\\

VVV

contour. The,Se prosodic features are transcribed as inTable 3.

The accent symbols are used mainly in referenceworks; we shall include them when discussing morphol-ogy. Certain morphological oppositions depend on theaccentual system; there are few minimal pairs like grad'city', grM 'hail' and pas 'belt', ptlS 'dog'. The distri-bution of tone, length, and accent is restricted. In the15th century, Stokavian moved the accent one syllablecloser to the beginning of the word; hence accent nowdoes not occur word-finally, except in monosyllables andin some recent borrowings. The "rising" and "falling"tones are more complex phonetically than those termsimply (rising = high pitch extending into the next syl-lable; cf. Lehiste and Ivi6 1986), and considerable vari-ation exists among speakers.

3. Morphology. Serbo-Croatian has seven cases, twonumbers, and three genders. Table 4 shows the main noundeclensions.

The morphology is predominantly fusional; gendercorrelates strongly with declensional class. The vocatiyeinvolves aputation of consonants for many masculinenouns: drug' comrade', voc.sg. drf1ze, a result ,of-the ~-Slavic first palatalization. The Slavic second palataliza-tion is also well preserved, as in the nom. pI. of masculirie .

Labial Dental

TABLE 2. Serbo-Croatian Consonants (Orthographic Representation)

Alveolar Palato-Alveolar Palatal Velar

Latin Cyrillic Latin Cyrillic

A a A a L I A A

B b E 6 Lj Ij Jb Jb

C C U Q M m M M

C C Y q N n H HC C 11 h Nj nJ I-b tb

D d A A 0 0 0 0Of dz I;I I) P P n nD d 1) t) R r P pE e E e S s C cF f <I> 1> S S III ill

G g r r T t T TH h X x U u Y yI i I1 If V v B BJ J J J Z z 3 3K k K K Z Z JK IK

StopsVoiceless p t kVoic-ed b d g

AffricatesVoiceless c C CVoiced dz d

FricativesVoiceless f s S hVoiced v z z

Nasals m n njLateral I IjVibrant rSemivowel

nouns, for example, zzlozi from zzlog 'shop window'. Theinnovative mutation 1 -7 0 in syllable coda also affectsnominal paradigms: p~peo 'ash', gen. sg. p~pela. Geni-tive/accusative syncretism is found with masculine ani-mate nouns in the singular. The major innovation in the

SERBO-CROA TIAN 49

nominal paradigms is the gen. pI. -a for most nouns. Asthe first noun in Table 4 shows, the length and tone ofthe accented syllable may change within a paradigm; theposition of the accent may also move. Almost all nounsare declined. Even vowel-final borrowings like bzr6 'of-fice' , gen. sg. biroa decline, unless they are feminine. Bycontrast, most numerals are now indeclinable.

A multi-tense system of verbal morphology is in theprocess of oeing replaced by one in which aspect has acentral role. The main conjugations can be classified bythe vowel-In"the present tense forms; see Table 5.

The Tsg. -m"has spread from a handful of verbs to allexcept mogu 'I can' and hOtu or tu 'I want'. (Subjectpersonal pronouns are normally omitted unless undercontrastive or emphatic stress.)

Before noting the remaining simple tenses, we mustconsider aspect. In broad outline, the aspectual system ofSerbo-Croatian is similar to that of Russian. In terms of

morphology, perfectives are typically derived from im-perfectives by prefixation, and inlperfectives from perfcx-tives"fiYsuffiicitlon. l!J.semantics, the perfective views a

situati£n)~§ a single whQl~,wb.ile the imperfective..¥iewsit as having internal constituency. Unlike Russian, how-ever, Serbo-Cro~tian forms a present tense from perfec-tive verbs, distinct from the future; this has a range ofuses, but is not employed for events occurring at themoment of speech. The two remaining simple tenses arethe imperfect and the aorist; the former indicates actionin process in the past, while the latter is normally usedfor a completed single action in the past. Both areparticularly used for events witnessed by the speaker. Notsurprisingly, given their meanings, the imperfect isformed only from imperfective verbs, and the aoristusually from perfectives. However, as part of the growingimportance of the aspectual opposition, both tenses arebeing supplanted by a compound past tense, particularlyin Serbia and Croatia. It employs the past participle ofthe verb, which agrees with the subject in gender andnumber; this is illustrated in Table 6 with the verb zn{}ti'to know' .

The other element of the compound past is the presenttense forms of bYti 'to be', which are enclitic. (There arealso full forms, used for emphasis and in questions.) Ifthere is no other word preceding, the participle standsbefore the enclitic; see Table 7.

The past tense can be formed from the verbs of bothaspects: {Pfsala, Nap(sala} je p(smo 'She {was writing/ wrote} a letter'. There are also an infrequently usedpluperfect tense, a conditional, and (mainly in the western

TABLE 4. Serbo-Croatian Nominal Declension

I

Masc. Neutera-Stem o-Stem o-Stem i-Stem

SingularNom. iena zakon selo stvilr

'woman' 'law' 'village' 'thing'Voc. no zakone selo stvilriAce. ienu zakon selo stvilrGen. iene zakona sela stvilriDat. ieni zakonu selu stvariInst. zenom zakonom selom stvilrju.

stvilriLoc. zeni zakonu selu stvari

. . . . .Plural

Nom. zene zakoni s't?la stvilriVoc. z"'ene zakoni s't?/a stvariAce. iene zakone s't?/a stvariGen. ibw zakona seta stvarfDat. zenama zakonima s't?lima stvarimaInst. zenama zakonima s't?/ima stvarimaLoc. zenama zakonima s't?lima stvarima

TABLE 5. "Serb6-Croatian Conjugation Types

I Conju- 11Conju- ill Con-gation gation jugation(-a-) (-f-) (-e-)

Infinitive gled.ati nositi tristi'to look' 'to carry' 'to shake'

PresentSingular I glediim nosfm trisem

2 glediis nosfs trises3 gledii nosf trise

Plural 1 glediimo nosfmo trisemo2 glediite nosfte trisete3 gledajil nOse trisil

ImperativeSingular 2 glediij nasi trisiPlural I glediijmo nosimo irisimo

2 glediijte nosite trisite

TABLE 6. Formsof the Serbo-CroatianPastParticiple

Masculine Feminine NeuterSingular znl}o« znal) znl}la znl}loPlural znl}li inl}le znl}la

--~~- -

50 SERBO-CROA TIAN

TABLE 7. Compound Past Tense in Serbo-Croatian. The tableuses the verb znllti 'to know' as an example.

Singular zn(}o. zn(}la samzn(}o. zn(}la sizn(}o, zn(}la. zn(}lo jezn(}li. zn(}le smozn(}li. zn(}le stezn(}li. zn(}le. zn(}la su

Plural

I23I23

variety) a past conditional. Unlike other compoundtenses, the future tense is formed with the present tenseof Ijek. htj~tilEk. ht~ti 'to want' (usually in its encliticforms) is an auxiliary plus the infinitive, for example,Zena ee znllti 'The woman will know'. It too is formed

with verbs of both aspects.4. Syntax. Serbo-Croatian enclitics are familiar to

many linguists because of the problems they have posedfor transformational theory (Browne 1974). Encliticsstand in second position in a clause. There are six "slots,"and each may be occupied by one enclitic:

(I) Interrogative particle: li(n) Verbal auxiliaries: sam, si, smo, ste, su (notje); eu,

ees, ee, eemoj. Cete, ee; bih, bi, bi, bismo, biste, bi

(ITI) Dative pronouns: Singular mi, ti, mu, joj (reflexivesi in west only); plural nam, vam, im

(IV) Genitive pronouns: Singular me, te, ga, je; pluralnas, vas, ih

(V) Accusative pronouns: identical to the genitive pro-nouns with the addition of the reflexive se and of

ju(VI) 3sg. form of biti: je

Consider the following examples:

(1) Gdje ste me vidjeli? (ljek., Cro.!Bos.)

Gde ste me videli? (Ek., Serb.)

where are(ENcL.II) me(ENCL.V)seen

'Where did you see me?'

(2) ielim mu ih dati.

wish to.him(III) them(V) to.give'I wish to give them to him.'

(3) Nasao ga je.

found it(V) is(VI)''He found it.'

If the combination se je is expected, thenje is dropped;but this rule is not absolute in Cro. The combination *jeje is replaced by ju je, for example, Znao ju je 'He knewher' (lit. 'knew her [V] is[VI]'). The notion of "second"position is complex. Clitics regularly stand after the firstaccented constituent:

(4) Taj pisac mi je napisao pismo.'That writer wr,ote me a letter.'

An initial constituent may be discounted:

(5) Ove godine, taj pisac mi je napisao pismo.

'This year, that writer wrote me a letter.'

Surprisingly, enclitics may come after the first accentedword within a phrase: ~

(6) Taj mi je pisac napisao pismo.

that to.me(III) is(VI) writer written letter'That writer wrote me a letter.'

A second point of syntactic interest is the replacementof infinitives, which occurs mainly in the east and is aBalkan areal feature. The infinitive is most likely to bereplaced when the meaning is that of purpose. Thusexamples like this occur freely in all standards:

(7) Jovan je dosao da kupi knjigu.

~ ~J. is come that buys book

---~ -"Jovan came to buy a book.'

Both infinitival and replacement constructions occurwith verbs like Ijek. zeljeti,Ek. ieleti 'to wish'; but inthe west, the infinitive is more usual, and in the east itsreplacement is more common. In the east, the construc-

--- tion with da has spread into the ordinary future: Jovanee da kupi knjigu 'Jovan will buy a book'. The infinitivebecomes rarer as one moves eastward.

~ -ffi view of the problems discussed, it is not surprisingthat SC data have figured in various theoretical debates,and that the language is also of special interest to thoseconcerned with issues of language planning.

[See also Slavic Languages.]

BmLIOGRAPHY

Browne, Wayles. 1974. On the problem of enclitic placementin Serbo-Croatian. In Slavic transformational syntax, editedby Richard D. Brecht and Catherine V. Chvany, pp. 36-52.

Ann Arbor: Dept. of Slavic Languages, University of Mich-igan.

Browne, Wayles. 1993. Serbo-Croat. In The Slavonic lan-

guages, edited by Bemard Comrie and Greville G. Corbett,pp. 306-387. London: Routledge.

Gvozdanovic, Jadranka. 1980. Tone and accent in Standard

Serbo-Croatian, with a synopsis of Serbo-Croatian phonol-

ogy. Vienna: Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.Kordic, Snjezana. 1997. Serbo-Croatian. (Languages of the

world/materials, 148.) Munich: Lincom Europa.Lehiste,. llse, and Pavle Ivic. 1986. Word and sentence prosody

inSerbo-Croatian. (Current studies in linguistics series, 13.)Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Meillet, Antoine, and Andre Vaillant. 1969. Grammaire de la

langue serbo-croate. 2d ed. Paris: Champion.Naylor, Kenneth E. 1980. Serbo-Croatian. In The Slavic literary

languages: Formation and development, e~ited by AlexanderM. Schenker and Edward Stankiewicz, pp. 65-83. NewHaven: Yale Conciliumon International and Area Studies.

GREVILLE G. CORBETT AND WAYLES BROWNE

SERIAL VERB. See Clause and Pidgins and Creoles.

SEX AND LANGUAGE. See Sociolinguistics.

"L

SmERIAN LANGUAGES. This entry concerns thelanguages spoken in that part of the Eurasian land masssituated east of the Ural Mountains and north of the

steppes, the Altay and adjacent mountain ranges, and theAmur River. (This follows the usual sense of "Siberia"in English; the Russian term excludes the eastern part.)This vast expanse does not form a single cultural area inthe traditionill sense, but in recent times, a marked ho-mogenization has set in with the spread of ethnic Russiansand the Russian language. Very few large areas are likethe Tuva Republic in having a majority of indigenousinhabitants. At a more local level, however, there havebeen numerous instarices of close contact between groupsspeaking genetically unrelated or distantly related lan-guages. Indeed, Russian is only the last of a series oflanguages that have penetrated Siberia. For geographicaldistributions of languages, see Map 1.

Most of the recent primary literature on languages of'Siberia is in Russian, but Comrie 1981 provides a generalintroduction to the area.

. Previously, Turkic languages had entered the area.Volga Tatar was the main entrant in the pre-Russian

SffiERIAN LANGUAGES 51

period, and there are still large pockets of Tatar speakersin southwestern Siberia. Turkic languages form the west-ern part of the southern fringe of Siberia, with varietiesof Mongolian farther east; and one Turkic language,Yakut, moved north to occupy the middle course of theLena River. Dolgan is closely related to Yakut but showsa strong Tungusic substrate.

In western Siberia, there are a number of uratIc lan-

guages, whose speakers originally migrated east fromtheir homeland to the west of the Ural Mountains:!(hanry(Ostyak) and Mansi (Vogul) form the Ob-Ugiic branchof Uralic. To their north are the Northern Samoyediclanguages Nenets (Yurak Samoyed), Enets (Yenisey Sam-oyed), and Nganasan (Tavgi Samoyed), and to.the_south,the Southern Samoyedic'language Selkup (Ostyak Sam-oyed). In the extreme east, the Eskimo (Siberian Yupik)population on the eastern tip of Siberia represents aremigration from Alaska back into Siberia.

Eastern Siberia, with the exception of the Chukotkaand Kamchatka peninsulas and ~~ Yakut area, is domi-nated by Tungusic languages, which formerly spread asfar as Manchuria, and which still occupy some of thearea to the south of the Amur River and on northern

Sakhalin. There are two good recent accounts ofTungusiclanguages in English: Nedjalkov 1997 and Nikolaeva2001.

In addition to these languages, which belong to wellestablished families or widely accepted stocks-andwhich for the most part (i.e. with the exception ofTungusic) are relatively recent arrivals in Siberia-anumber of Siberian languages have no widely establishedgenetic relations with languages outside Siberia. Theyare referred to collectively as Paleo-Siberian (or, in Sovietliterature, Paleo-Asiatic) languages; however this term isdefined negatively as "not belonging to any establishedfamily," rather than as an indication of genetic affiliation.A recent survey is Plank and Maslova 2001.

The Chukotko- Kamchatkan languages, spoken in thepeninsulas of Chukotka and Kamchatka, constitute asmall, well-established family, consisting of Chukchi,Koryak, Kerek, Alutor, and Kamchadal (Itelmen). Kam-chadal is the most aberrant member of the family. Char-acteristic of this family, especially of Chukchi and Ko-ryak, is a dominant/recessive vowel harmony systembased on vowel height: the dominant vowels e Cl0 pairwith recessive i e u respectively (with e in both series).If any morpheme in a word contains a dominant vowel,all recessive vowels must be lowered to the correspondingdominant vowel-e.g. Chukchi kupre 'net', but gakopra-