Node I was looking for some good example of the difference between Serbian and Zlatiborian So I decided to translate the first part of the article about English language from Wikipedia to both languages Now I don t know how good you can understand the Cyrillic script but all the different words and phrases in Zlatiborian are bold ENGLISH The English language is a West Germanic language that originated in England from Old English Anglo Saxon which in turn developed from languages brought by settlers from areas in modern northern Germany and Denmark It is the second most common first language with around 340 million native speakers worldwide English has lingua franca diplomatic language status in many parts of the world due to the military economic scientific political and cultural influence of the United Kingdom in the 18th and 19th centuries and the United States beginning in the 20th century It is the most widely learned second language due largely to the former extent of the British Empire in the 19th and early 20th century and to the enormous influence the United States has exerted through radio television cinema scientific publications and the Internet in recent decades History English is descended from languages spoken by Germanic tribes that migrated from what is now northern Germany and perhaps Denmark to what is now England These tribes are traditionally identified as the Frisians Angles Saxons and Jutes According to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle around the year 449 Vortigern King of the British Isles issued an invitation to the Angle kin Angles led by Hengest and Horsa to help him against the Picts In return the Angles were granted lands in the South East Further aid was sought and in response came men of Ald Seaxum of Anglum of Iotum Saxons Angles and Jutes The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms Modern scholarship considers most of this story to be legendary and politically motivated These Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic speaking inhabitants whose languages survived largely in Scotland Wales Cornwall and Ireland The dialects spoken by these invaders formed what would be called Old English which was a very similar language to modern Frisian Later it was also strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Old Norse spoken by Norse who settled mainly in the North East see Jorvik English England and East Anglia are derived from words referring to the Angles Englisc Angelcynn and Engleland For the 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066 the Kings of England spoke only French using it as the Court language A large number of French words were assimilated into Old English some words doubling with Saxon words for instance ox and beef sheep and mutton The Old English also lost most of its inflections resulting in Middle English Around the year 1500 the Great Vowel Shift transformed Middle English to Modern English The most famous surviving works from Old and Middle English are Beowulf and Geoffrey Chaucer s The Canterbury Tales respectively Modern English the language described by this article began its rise around the time of William Shakespeare Classification and related languages The English language belongs to the western sub branch of the Germanic branch of the Indo European family of languages The closest living relative of English is Scots Lallans a West Germanic language spoken mostly in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland Like English Scots is a direct descendant of Old English also known as Anglo Saxon After Scots the next closest relatives are Frisian spoken in the Netherlands and Germany and modern Low Saxon language spoken primarily in northern Germany Other less closely related living languages include Dutch Afrikaans German and the Scandinavian languages Many French words are also intelligible to an English speaker pronunciations are not always identical of course as English absorbed a tremendous amount of vocabulary from the Norman language after the Norman conquest and from French in further centuries as a result a substantial share of English vocabulary is quite close to the French with some minor spelling differences word endings use of old French spellings etc as well as occasional differences in meaning SERBIAN E 340 lingua franca