The Serbian language is one of the standard versions of the Štokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and by Serbs everywhere. The former standard is known as Serbo-Croatian language, now split into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian standards.

Serbian orthography is very consistent: 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 Stefanovic Karadžic when reforming the Cyrillic orthography of Serbian in the 19th century.

Two alphabets are used in Serbian language: the Cyrillic and the Latin. The two alphabets are almost equivalent; the only difference being the glyphs used. This is due to historical reasons; Serbian once being a part of the Serbo-Croat unification brought Latin usage into Serbia.

Standard Serbian is based on the Štokavian dialect. The Ekavian variant is spoken mostly in Serbia and ijekavian in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, south-western Serbia, and Croatia. The base for is the ijekavian dialect is East-Herzegowinian, and of the ekavian Šumadija-Vojvodina dialect. Features of other shtokavian dialects, as well of Torlakian dialect, which is spoken in southern Serbia, are not accepted as standard.

Shtokavian or Štokavian (Serbo-Croatian: štokavski/) is the primary dialect of the Central South Slavic languages system: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian language.

The Štokavian dialect is spoken in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and the greater part of Croatia. The Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian standard languages are all based on the Neo-Štokavian dialect. Its name comes from the form for the interrogatory pronoun "what", which is "što" in the Štokavian dialect.

The primary subdivisions of Štokavian are based on 2 principles: one is whether the subdialect is Old-Štokavian or Neo-Štokavian, and the different ways the old Slavic phoneme jat has been changed. Generally, modern dialectology recognizes 7 Štokavian subdialects (there are opinions that one or two subdialects more exist, but this is not universally accepted).