pronounced as /notice/Serbo-Croatian is a South Slavic language with four national standards. The Eastern Herzegovinian Neo-Shtokavian dialect forms the basis for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian (the four national standards).
Standard Serbo-Croatian has 30 phonemes according to the traditional analysis: 25 consonants and 5 vowels (or 10, if long vowels are analysed as distinct phonemes). It features four types of pitch accent, although it is not the characteristics of all dialects.
The consonant system of Serbo-Croatian has 25 phonemes. One peculiarity is a presence of both post-alveolar and palatal affricates, but a lack of corresponding palatal fricatives. Unlike most other Slavic languages such as Russian, there is no palatalized versus non-palatalized (hard–soft) contrast for most consonants.
| Labial | Dental/ alveolar | Retroflex | (Alveolo-) palatal | Velar | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| Plosive | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| Affricate | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| Fricative | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| Approximant | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| Trill | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
pronounced as //r// can be syllabic, short or long, and carry rising or falling tone, e.g. kȓv ('blood'), sȑce ('heart'), sŕna ('deer'), mȉlosr̄đe ('compassion'). It is typically realized by inserting a preceding or (more rarely) succeeding non-phonemic vocalic glide.
pronounced as //l// is generally velarized or "dark" pronounced as /link/. Diachronically, it was fully vocalized into pronounced as //o// in coda positions, as in past participle *radil > radio ('worked'). In some dialects, notably Torlakian and Kajkavian that process did not take place, and pronounced as //l// can be syllabic as well. However, in the standard language, vocalic pronounced as //l// appears only in loanwords, as in the name for the Czech river Vltava for instance, or debakl, bicikl. Very rarely other sonorants are syllabic, such as pronounced as //ʎ̩// in the surname Štarklj and pronounced as //n̩// in njutn ('newton').
The retroflex[2] [3] consonants pronounced as //ʂ, ʐ, tʂ, dʐ// are, in more detailed phonetic studies, described as apical pronounced as /[ʃ̺, ʒ̺, t̺ʃ̺ʷ, d̺ʒ̺ʷ]/. In most spoken Croatian idioms, as well as in some Bosnian, they are postalveolar (pronounced as //ʃ, ʒ, t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ//) instead, and there could be a complete or partial merger between pronounced as //tʂ, dʐ// and palatal affricates pronounced as //tɕ, dʑ//.
Alveolo-palatal fricatives pronounced as /[ɕ, ʑ]/ are marginal phonemes, usually realized as consonant clusters pronounced as /[sj, zj]/. However, the emerging Montenegrin standard has proposed two additional letters, Latin (Ś), (Ź) and Cyrillic (С́), (З́), for the phonemic sequences pronounced as //sj, zj//, which may be realized phonetically as pronounced as /[ɕ, ʑ]/.
Voicing contrasts are neutralized in consonant clusters, so that all obstruents are either voiced or voiceless depending on the voicing of the final consonant, though this process of voicing assimilation may be blocked by syllable boundaries.
The Serbo-Croatian vowel system is symmetrically composed of five vowel qualities pronounced as //a, e, i, o, u//. Although the difference between long and short vowels is phonemic, it is not represented in standard orthography, as it is in Czech or Slovak orthography, except in dictionaries. Unstressed vowels are shorter than the stressed ones by 30% (in the case of short vowels) and 50% (in the case of long vowels).
| Front | Central | Back | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| short | long | short | long | short | long | ||
| Close | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Mid | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||
| Open | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
The long Ijekavian reflex of Proto-Slavic jat is of disputed status. The prescriptive grammar published by the foremost Croatian normative body—the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, describes it as a diphthong,[4] but this norm has been heavily criticized by phoneticians as having no foundation in the spoken language, the alleged diphthong being called a "phantom phoneme".[5] Thus the reflex of long jat, which is spelled as a trigraph (ije) in standard Croatian, Bosnian and Ijekavian Serbian, represents the sequence pronounced as //jeː//.
Stressed vowels carry one of the two basic tones, rising and falling.
New Shtokavian dialects (which form the basis of the standard languages) allow two tones on stressed syllables and have distinctive vowel length and so distinguish four combinations, called pitch accent: short falling (ȅ), short rising (è), long falling (ȇ), and long rising (é).[6]
Most speakers from Serbia and Croatia do not distinguish between short rising and short falling tones. They also pronounce most unstressed long vowels as short, with some exceptions, such as genitive plural endings. Several Southern Serbian dialects, notably the dialect of Niš, lack vowel length and pitch accent, instead using a stress-based system, as well as differing from the standard language in stress placement. These are considered barbarisms which leads to varying degrees of code switching.
The accent can be on any syllable, but rarely on the last syllable. This is relevant for Serbia, where educated speakers otherwise speak close to standard Serbian in professional contexts; this is less so in Croatia, where educated speakers often use a local Croatian variant which might have a quite different stress system. For example, even highly educated speakers in Zagreb will have no tones, and can have stress on any syllable.
Accent alternations are very frequent in inflectional paradigms, in both quality and placement in the word (the so-called "mobile paradigms", which were present in Proto-Indo-European itself and became much more widespread in Proto-Balto-Slavic). Different inflected forms of the same lexeme can exhibit all four accents: pronounced as //ˈlǒnats// ('pot' nominative sg.), lónca pronounced as //ˈlǒːntsa// (genitive singular), lȏnci pronounced as //ˈlôːntsi// (nominative plural), lȍnācā pronounced as //ˈlônaːtsaː// (genitive plural).
Research done by Pavle Ivić and Ilse Lehiste has shown that all stressed syllables of Serbo-Croatian words are basically spoken with a high tone and that native speakers rely on the phonetic tone of the first post-tonic syllable to judge the pitch accent of any given word. If the high tone of the stressed syllable is carried over to the first post-tonic syllable, the accent is perceived as rising. If it is not, the accent is perceived as falling, which is the reason monosyllabic words are always perceived as falling. Therefore, truly narrow phonetic transcriptions of lònac, lónca, lȏnci and lȍnācā are pronounced as /[ˈlónáts, ˈlóːntsá, ˈlóːntsì, ˈlónàˑtsàˑ]/ or the equivalent pronounced as /[ˈlo˥nats˥, ˈloːn˥tsa˥, ˈloːn˥tsi˩, ˈlo˥naˑ˩tsaˑ˩]/. Ivić and Lehiste were not the first scholars to notice this; in fact, made a very similar discovery decades earlier, but it was ignored due to his being a foreigner, and because it contradicted the Vukovian approach, which was then already well-ingrained.
Although distinctions of pitch occur only in stressed syllables, unstressed vowels maintain a length distinction. Pretonic syllables are always short, but posttonic syllables may be either short or long. These are traditionally counted as two additional accents. In the standard language, the six accents are realized as follows:
| Slavicist symbol | IPA symbol | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ȅ | pronounced as /ê/ | short vowel with falling tone | |
| ȇ | pronounced as /êː/ | long vowel with falling tone | |
| è | pronounced as /ě/ | short vowel with rising tone | |
| é | pronounced as /ěː/ | long vowel with rising tone | |
| e | pronounced as /e/ | non-tonic short vowel | |
| ē | pronounced as /eː/ | non-tonic long vowel |
Examples are short falling as in nȅbo ('sky') pronounced as //ˈnêbo//; long falling as in pîvo ('beer') pronounced as //ˈpîːvo//; short rising as in màskara ('eye makeup') pronounced as //ˈmǎskara//; long rising as in čokoláda ('chocolate') pronounced as //t͡ʂokoˈlǎːda//. Unstressed long syllables can occur only after the accented syllable, as in d(j)èvōjka ('girl') pronounced as //ˈd(ј)ěvoːjka// or dòstavljānje ('delivering') pronounced as //ˈdǒstavʎaːɲe//. There can be more than one post-accent length in a word, notably in genitive plural of nouns: kȍcka ('cubes') → kȍcākā ('cubes''). Realization of the accents varies by region.
Restrictions on the distribution of the accent depend, beside the position of the syllable, also on its quality, as not every kind of accent can be manifested in every syllable.
Thus, monosyllabics generally have falling tone, and polysyllabics generally have falling or rising tone on the first syllable and rising in all the other syllables but the last one. The tonal opposition rising ~ falling is hence generally possible only in the first accented syllable of polysyllabic words, and the opposition by lengths, long ~ short, is possible in the accented syllable, as well as in the postaccented syllables (but not in a preaccented position).
Proclitics, clitics that latch on to a following word, on the other hand, may "steal" a falling tone (but not a rising tone) from the following monosyllabic or disyllabic word. The stolen accent is always short and may end up being either falling or rising on the proclitic. The phenomenon (accent shift to proclitic) is most frequent in the spoken idioms of Bosnia, as in Serbian it is more limited (normally with the negation proclitic ne) and it is almost absent from Croatian Neo-Shtokavian idioms. Such a shift is less frequent for short rising accents than for the falling one (as seen in this example: pronounced as //ʒěliːm// → pronounced as //ne ʒěliːm//).
| in isolation | with proclitic | Translation | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Croatian | Serbian | Bosnian | |||||
| rising | pronounced as //ʒěliːm// | 'I want' | pronounced as //neʒěliːm// | 'I don't want' | |||
| pronounced as //zǐːma// | 'winter' | pronounced as //uzîːmu// | pronounced as //ûziːmu// | 'in the winter' | |||
| pronounced as //nemoɡǔːtɕnoːst// | 'inability' | pronounced as //unemoɡǔːtɕnosti// | 'not being able to' | ||||
| falling | pronounced as //vîdiːm// | 'I see' | pronounced as //něvidiːm// | 'I can't see' | |||
| pronounced as //ɡrâːd// | 'city' | pronounced as //uɡrâːd// | pronounced as //ûɡraːd// | 'to the city' (stays falling) | |||
| pronounced as //ʃûma// | 'forest' | pronounced as //uʃûmi// | pronounced as //ǔʃumi// | 'in the forest' (becomes rising) | |||
Serbo-Croatian exhibits a number of morphophonological alternations. Some of them are inherited from Proto-Slavic and are shared with other Slavic languages, and some of them are exclusive to Serbo-Croatian, representing later innovation.
The so-called "fleeting a" (nepóstojānō a), or "movable a", refers to the phenomenon of short /a/ making apparently random appearance and loss in certain inflected forms of nouns. This is a result of different types of reflexes Common Slavic jers */ъ/ and */ь/, which in Štokavian and Čakavian dialects merged to one schwa-like sound, which was lost in a weak position and vocalized to */a/ in a strong position, giving rise to what is apparently unpredictable alternation. In most of the cases, this has led to such /a/ appearing in word forms ending in consonant clusters, but not in forms with vowel ending.
The "fleeting a" is most common in the following cases:
('fighter' nom. sg.) – bórca (gen. sg.) – bȏrācā (gen. pl.)
('young man' nom. sg.) – mòmka (gen. sg.) – momákā (gen. pl.)
('chair' nom. sg.) – stólca (gen. sg.) – stȍlācā (gen. pl.)
('board') – dasákā, ('sister') – sestárā, ('barrel') – bȁčāvā
('short') – kràtkī, ('what kind of') – kàkvi, ('entire') – svȉ
The reflex of the Slavic first palatalization was retained in Serbo-Croatian as an alternation of
pronounced as //k// → pronounced as //t͡ʂ//
pronounced as //ɡ// → pronounced as //ʐ//
pronounced as //x// → pronounced as //ʂ//before pronounced as //e// in inflection, and before pronounced as //j, i, e// and some other segments in word formation. This alternation is prominently featured in several characteristic cases:
('hero') → jȕnāče, ('devil') → vrȃže, ('walnut') → òraše. It is, however, not caused by the same ending -e in accusative plural: junáke, vrȃge, òrahe.
There are some exceptions to the process of palatalization. The conditions are:
Doublets exist with adjectives derived with suffix -in from trisyllabic proper names:
The output of the second and the third Slavic palatalization is in the Serbo-Croatian grammar tradition known as "sibilantization" (sibilarizácija/сибилариза́ција). It results in the following alternations before pronounced as //i//:
pronounced as //k// → pronounced as //ts//
pronounced as //ɡ// → pronounced as //z//
pronounced as //x// → pronounced as //s//This alternation is prominently featured in several characteristic cases:
In two cases there is an exception to sibilantization:
Bȁsk ('Basque') →Bȁski, brȍnh ('bronchus') → brȍnhi, ȅrg → ȅrgi
Čȅhi ('Czechs'), Nȍvāki ('Novaks')
Srȅćko → Srȅćki, Zelénko → Zelénki
nátucak → nátucki
báka ('grandmother') → báki, séka ('little sister') → séki, bráco ('little brother') →bráci, zéko ('bunny') → zéki, stríko ('uncle [affectionate]') → stríki
dȅka ('blanket') →dȅki, kȕka ('hook') →kȕki, koléga ('colleague') →kolégi, pjȅga ('freckle') →pjȅgi, zȃliha ('supply') →zȃlihi
Jȇlka → Jȇlki, Lȗka → Lȗki, Jȁdrānka → Jȁdrānki
kȍcka ('cube') →kȍcki, tȍčka ('point') →tȍčki, prȁćka ('sling') →prȁćki, pljȕska ('slap') →pljȕski, pȁtka ('duck') →pȁtki, màzga ('mule') →màzgi
Kȑka → Kȑki, Kartága ('Carthage') → Kartági
intelektùālka ('an intellectual' feminine) →intelektùālki, kàjkāvka ('Kajkavian speaker' feminine) →kàjkāvki, srednjòškōlka ('high school girl') →srednjòškōlki
Doublets are allowed in the following cases:
flamìngo → flamìnzi : flamìngi
Bȅg → Bȅgi : Bȅzi, Dȕh → Dȕhi : Dȕsi
máčak ('cat' masculine) →máčki : máčci, òplećak ('ephod') →òplećki : òplećci, omeđak → omećki : omećci
Líka → Líci : Líki
Àljaska ('Alaska') → Àljaski : Àljasci, Gràdiška → Gràdiški : Gràdišci
gȕska ('goose') →gȕski : gȕsci, bȉtka ('battle') →bȉtki : bȉ(t)ci, trȃvka ('blade of grass') → trȃvci : trȃvki
See main article: Iotation.
There are two types of consonant assimilation: by voicing (jednačenje po zvučnosti) and by place of articulation (jednačenje po m(j)estu tvorbe).
See main article: Consonant voicing and devoicing. All consonants in clusters are neutralized by voicing, but Serbo-Croatian does not exhibit final-obstruent devoicing as most other Slavic languages do. Assimilation is practically always regressive, i.e. voicing of the group is determined by voicing of the last consonant.[7] Sonorants are exempted from assimilation, so it affects only the following consonants:
kobac ('hawk') →kobca : kopca (nominative → genitive, with fleeting a)
top ('cannon') + džija → topdžija : tobdžija ('cannonman')
burek ('burek') + džija → burekdžija : buregdžija ('burek-baker')
pod- ('under-') + platiti ('pay') → podplatiti : potplatiti ('to bribe')
vrač ('sorcerer') + -bina → vračbina : vradžbina ('witchcraft')
uč- ('learn-') + -benik → učbenik : udžbenik ('textbook')
težak ('heavy') →težki : teški (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
uzak ('narrow') →uzki : uski (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
s- ('off-') + baciti ('throw') →sbaciti : zbaciti ('throw off')
stan ('apartment') →stanbena zgrada : stambena zgrada ('apartment building')
Furthermore, pronounced as //f//, pronounced as //x// and pronounced as //ts// don't have voiced counterparts, so they trigger the assimilation, but are not affected by it.[7]
As can be seen from the examples above, assimilation is generally reflected in orthography. However, there are numerous orthographic exceptions, i.e. even if voicing or devoicing does take place in speech, the orthography does not record it, usually to maintain the etymology clearer.
See main article: Assimilation (phonology). Assimilation by place of articulation affects pronounced as //s// and pronounced as //z// in front of (post)alveolars pronounced as //ʃ/, /ʒ/, /t͡ʂ/, /d͡ʐ/, /tɕ/, /dʑ//, as well as palatals pronounced as //ʎ// and pronounced as //ɲ//, producing pronounced as //ʃ// or pronounced as //ʒ//:[7]
pas ('dog') + -če → pašče ('small dog')
list ('leaf') + -je → listće : lisće : lišće ('leaves')
prositi ('to beg') + -nja → prosnja : prošnja ('begging')
snositi ('to bear') + -ljiv → snosljiv : snošljiv ('bearable')
miraz ('dowry') + -džika → mirazdžika : miraždžika ('girl with dowry')
grozd ('grape bunch') + -je → grozđe : grožđe ('grapes')
paziti ('to care') + -nja → paznja : pažnja ('care')
paziti ('to care') + -ljiv → pazljiv : pažljiv ('careful')
Simultaneously, assimilation by voicing is triggered if necessary.
See also: L-vocalization. A historical pronounced as //l// in coda position has become pronounced as //o// and is now so spelled, and produces an additional syllable. For example, the Serbo-Croatian name of Belgrade is Beograd. However, in Croatian, the process is partially reversed; compare Croatian stol, vol, sol vs. Serbian sto, vo, so ('table', 'ox' and 'salt').
The sample text is a reading of the first sentence of The North Wind and the Sun by a 57-year-old female announcer at the Croatian Television Network reading in a colloquial style.
pronounced as //sjêʋeːrniː lědeniː ʋjêtar i sûːnt͡se su se prěpirali o sʋǒjo:j snǎːzi//
pronounced as /[sjêʋeˑrniˑ ɫědeniˑ ʋjêtar i sûːnt͡se su se prěpiraɫi o sʋǒjoˑj snǎːzi]/
Sjeverni ledeni vjetar i Sunce su se prepirali o svojoj snazi.