There are four provinces or governments (Sandshaks), Semendria, Perserin, Veltshterin, and Aladshahissar, consisting of nearly a million of Servians, subjected to Turkish authority. The greater part of these are Christians of the Greek Church. The number of Servians who recognise the _Greek Church_ is estimated by Schaffarik at 2,526,000. { 0d}
The various idioms of the Slavonian language may, without exception, be traced up to one single stem, the old or church Slavonic. From this one source, two great streams flow forth; the northern, comprehending the Bohemian, Polish, and Russian; and the southern, composed of the Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Servian tongues. The latter branches were much less extensively employed than the former. About a million and a half of men speak the Hungarian; not more than half a million the Bulgarian, which in Macedonia has been superseded by the Romaic, the Albanian, and the Turkish; while the Servian idiom, the most cultivated, the most interesting, and the most widely spread of all the southern Slavonian dialects, is the language of about five millions, of whom about two millions are Mahommedans. { 0e}
The vicinity of Greece and Italy modified and mellowed the language of Servia, which is, in fact, the Russian hellenized, deprived of its hardiness and its consonant terminations, and softened down into a perfect instrument for poetry and music. { 0f} Of the descendants from the ancient Slavonic, it is more closely allied to the Russian and Windish idioms, than to the Bohemian or Polish. Vuk Karadjich divides it into three distinct dialects, the _Herzegovinian_, or that spoken in Bosnia, Montenegro, Dalmatia, and Croatia; the _Sirmian_, which is used in Sirmia and Slavonian and the _Resavian_. No doubt the Servian language has been considerably influenced by the Turkish, but though it has been enriched by oriental words, it has not adopted an oriental construction. Schaffarik, in describing the different Slavonic tongues, says, fancifully but truly, that “Servian song resembles the tune of the violin; Old Slavonian, that of the organ; Polish, that of the guitar. The Old Slavonian in its psalms, sounds like the loud rush of the mountain stream; the Polish, like the bubbling and sparkling of a fountain; and the Servian like the quiet murmuring of a streamlet in the valley.”