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.
Consonants
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 Plosive Affricate Fricative Approximant Trill is labiodental before , as in , whereas is velar before , as in . are dental, whereas are alveolar. become laminal denti-alveolar , before dental consonants. is palato-alveolar ., cited in is a phonetic fricative, although it has less frication than . However, it does not interact with unvoiced consonants in clusters as a fricative would, and so is considered to be phonologically a sonorant (approximant). are voiced before voiced consonants. Glottal stop may be inserted between vowels across word boundary, as in . has more allophones: are retracted to before . is retracted to when it is initial in a consonant cluster, as in .
can be syllabic, short or long, and carry rising or falling tone, e.g. ('blood'), ('heart'), ('deer'), ('compassion'). It is typically realized by inserting a preceding or succeeding non-phonemic vocalic glide.
is generally velarized or "dark" . Diachronically, it was fully vocalized into in coda positions, as in past participle * > ('worked'). In some dialects, notably Torlakian and Kajkavian, that process did not take place, and can be syllabic as well. However, in the standard language, vocalic appears only in loanwords, as in the name for the Czech river for instance, or Very rarely other sonorants are syllabic, such as in the surname and in ('newton').
The retroflex consonants are, in more detailed phonetic studies, described as apical . In most spoken Croatian idioms, as well as in some Bosnian, they are postalveolar () instead, and there could be a complete or partial merger between and palatal affricates . where most Croatian and some Bosnian speakers merge the pairs č, ć and dž, đ , into and .
Alveolo-palatal fricatives are marginal phonemes, usually realized as consonant clusters . However, the emerging Montenegrin standard has proposed two additional letters, Latin , and Cyrillic , , for the phonemic sequences , which may be realized phonetically as . 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.
Vowels
The Serbo-Croatian vowel system is symmetrically composed of five vowel qualities . 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 Mid Open
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, "Prednji je i složeni samoglasnik, dvoglasnik (diftong) ie. Pri njegovu su izgovoru govorni organi najprije u položaju sličnom kao pri izgovoru glasa i, a onda postupno prelaze u položaj za izgovor glasa e. U hrvatskom književnom jeziku dvoglasnik je ie ravan diftong." 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". "Iako se odraz dugoga jata u kojem ijekavskom govoru možda i može opisati kao dvoglas, on tu u standardu sasma sigurno nije. Taj tobožnji dvoglas treba maknuti iz priručnikâ standardnoga jezika jer nema nikakve koristi od uvođenja fantomskih fonema bez ikakve podloge u standardnojezičnoj stvarnosti." Thus the reflex of long jat, which is spelled as a trigraph in standard Croatian, Bosnian and Ijekavian Serbian, represents the sequence . Stressed vowels carry one of the two basic tones, rising and falling.
Pitch accent
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). (CROLIB). 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: ('pot' nominative sg.), (genitive singular), (nominative plural), (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 , , and are or the equivalent . Transcriptions may also use secondary stress, as in Swedish: .
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:
Slavicistsymbol IPAsymbol Description short vowel with falling tone long vowel with falling tone short vowel with rising tone long vowel with rising tone non-tonic short vowel non-tonic long vowel
Examples are short falling as in ('sky') ; long falling as in ('beer') ; short rising as in ('eye makeup') ; long rising as in ('chocolate') . Unstressed long syllables can occur only after the accented syllable, as in ('girl') or ('delivering') . There can be more than one post-accent length in a word, notably in genitive plural of nouns: ('cubes') → ('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.
Falling tone generally occurs in monosyllabic words or the first syllable of a word ( ('belt'), ('horn'); ('old woman'), ('river ship'); ('small house'), . The only exception to this rule are interjections, words uttered in the state of excitement (such as , ) Rising tone generally occurs in any syllable of a word except the last one and so never occurs in monosyllabics ( 'water', 'harbour'; 'meadow', 'slamming'; 'orphan', 'beginning'; 'wormhole', 'liberation'). 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 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: → ).
in isolation with proclitic Translation Croatian Serbian Bosnian rising 'I want' 'I don't want' 'winter' 'in the winter' 'inability' 'not being able to' falling 'I see' 'I can't see' 'city' 'to the city' (stays falling) 'forest' 'in the forest' (becomes rising)
Morphophonemic alternations 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.
Fleeting a The so-called "fleeting 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: in nominative singular, accusative singular for animate nouns, and genitive plural for certain type of masculine nouns: ('fighter' nom. sg.) – (gen. sg.) – (gen. pl.) ('young man' nom. sg.) – (gen. sg.) – (gen. pl.) ('chair' nom. sg.) – (gen. sg.) – (gen. pl.) in genitive plural forms of feminine nouns ending in a consonant cluster: ('board') – , ('sister') – , ('barrel') – in nominative singular indefinite masculine forms of adjectives and pronouns: ('short') – , ('what kind of') – , ('entire') –
Palatalization
The reflex of the Slavic first palatalization was retained in Serbo-Croatian as an alternation of → → → before in inflection, and before and some other segments in word formation. This alternation is prominently featured in several characteristic cases: