History of Serbian Language

The subject matter of the research is the Serbian language in a diachronic perspective. It includes two main fields: a) Old Serbian, and b) different types of literary languages (Serbian Church Slavonic, Russian Church Slavonic, Slavonic-Serbian and the language type called dositejevski jezik), as well as the early history of the standard Serbian language. Research in the previous project period has shown that studying both Old Serbian and literary languages in the frames of the same project is necessary, since in the sociolinguistic situation of diglossia they influenced each other in many different ways. The research will include the phonological, morphological, syntactic-semantic and lexical levels. Having in mind the theoretical and methodological principles in historical linguistics, the relevant processes in the history of Serbian language will be studied in the comparative Slavic perspective as well. The results of the project will be studies which will: a) describe and explain the general changes which occurred in the written history of Serbian and in the period from the late Proto-Slavic to the first recorded documents, b) shed light on its dialectal divergence, c) define the functional stratification of the standard Old Serbian in the official documents, d) present the development of different types of literary languages, their internal and external dynamics, e) analyze the representative manuscripts on various linguistic levels.