Lila Hammond's SERBIAN: An Essential Grammar is a fairly standard entry in Routledge's Essential Grammars line, which describes the basics of a language from a synchronic perspective. Besides nominal declension and verb conjugation paradigms, we find guides to such idiomatic usage as days, months and dates, telling time, age, and weights and measures. The guidance on syntax, especially the placement of enclitics which can be challenging for English speakers, will prove very helpful.



While this is a helpful reference for students of Serbian, as well as an entertaining book people who just speak another Slavonic language and want to get a general feel for Serbian, it unfortunately has a few shortcomings. The complicated matter of the Serbian tonal accent is basically discounted as unimportant for foreigners, getting only two pages which raise more questions than they settle. The typesetting is quite odd in that for the sound /u/, the Cyrillic small letter straight u is used, which is normally found in Turkic languages for the high front rounded vowel; I assume the publisher just made a mistake and substituted this for the normal Cyrillic u. There are also several irksome typos in the paradigms.

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