Serbian Church Slavic

Serbian Church Slavic, also known as Serbian Church Slavonic (Serbian: српскословенски језик), was a liturgical and literary language used by the Serbs during the medieval and early modern periods, from the 11th up to the 18th century. It was a redaction of the Old Church Slavonic language, as applied under various influences of early vernacular forms of the Serbian language. It was the language of Medieval Serbian literature and early modern Serbian printing.^[1][2]

In various scholarly sources, written in the English language, Serbian redaction or recension of the Church Slavic language is most commonly named as Serbian Church Slavic/Slavonic, or Serbian Old Slavic/Slavonic, and sometimes also as Serbian Old Church Slavic/Slavonic, or just Serbian-Slavic/Slavonic (abbreviated further as Serbo-Slavic/Slavonic), thus reflecting the variety of forms used as designations for the Old Church Slavic/Slavonic language and its redactions in general.^[3][4][5]

During the medieval and early modern periods, the liturgical and literary use of the Old Slavic literary language among Serbs was marked by various influences from the Serbian old vernacular language, thus creating a distinctive Serbian redaction or recension of the common Old Church Slavic literary language. Liturgical and other works of the Medieval Serbian literature were created in the Serbian Church Slavic language, while old Serbian vernacular language was used mainly in private letters and various documents, particularly during the late medieval and early modern periods.^[6][2]

First traces of Serbian vernacular influences on the common Old Church Slavic language are recorded in liturgical works written both in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts, such as the Glagolitic Codex Marianus from the 11th century, and particularly the Cyrillic Miroslav Gospel from the 12th century.^[7] Earliest written monuments, created before the 13th century, testify that the formative process that created the Serbian redaction was by that time already completed.

In Cyrillic application, it had three orthographic varieties:

• Zeta-Hum orthography, which was the oldest (used in Serbian lands until the beginning of the 13th century)
• Raška orthography, which succeeded the previous (used in Serbian lands until the first decades of the 15th century)
• Resava orthography, which originated in the early 1400s within the Resava Literary School, under the influence of Constantine of Kostenets and other educated clerics and scribes who fled to Serbia after the fall of Bulgaria (1393–1396), and promoted the introduction of forms that resembled more closely the Bulgarian redaction.

One of orthographic features characteristic for the Serbian redaction was the use of an Old Serbian letter known as djerv (Ꙉꙉ), employed for the Serbian reflexes of Proto-Slavic *tj and *dj (*t͡ɕ, *d͡ʑ, *d͡ʒ, and *tɕ)

Serbian Church Slavic language continued to be used during the early modern period, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries, as attested by liturgical and literary works from that era, created within the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć, and those traditions continued up to the beginning of the 18th century.^[8] It was also used as the language of early modern Serbian printing, between the end of the 15th century and the middle of the 17th century.^[9]

During the Great Migrations (1690), many Serbs left Ottoman-held territories and settled in southern areas of the Kingdom of Hungary, within the Habsburg Empire. At first, the Serbian Orthodox Church continued to use the traditional Serbian Church Slavic language, but Habsburg authorities did not allow the Serbs to establish their own Cyrillic printing presses. In the same time, Serbian churches and schools received help in books and teachers from the Russian Empire, but those books were printed in the Russian Church Slavic language (synodical, or neo-Moscowian redaction). Thus, by the mid-18th century, traditional Serbian Church Slavic language was gradually replaced with Russo-Slavonic (Russian redaction of Church Slavonic) as the principal liturgical and literary language of the Serbs, and by the end of the same century, mixture of those two traditions produced a hybrid literary language known as the Slavonic-Serbian.^[10][11][12]