Serbo-Croatian phonology

Serbo-Croatian is a South Slavic language with four national standards. This article deals exclusively with the Eastern Herzegovinian Neo-Shtokavian dialect, the basis for the standards of Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian.

Serbo-Croatian has 30 phonemes, 25 consonants and 5 vowels, and a pitch accent.

All lexemes are spelled in accented form in both scripts (Gaj's Latin and Vuk's Cyrillic), as well as in both accents where these differ (Ijekavian and Ekavian, with Ijekavian bracketed). Translations are given as tooltips, and can be seen by hovering the cursor over a marked entry.

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.


 * is labiodental before, as in tramvaj , whereas  is velar  before , as in stanka.
 * are dental, whereas are alveolar. The first two become laminal denti-alveolar,  before dental consonants.
 * is palato-alveolar.
 * 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 i onda.
 * has more allophones:
 * are retracted to before.
 * is retracted to when it is initial in a consonant cluster, as in hmelj.
 * is labiovelar before, as in vuk.

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 (more rarely) succeeding non-phonemic vocalic glide.

is generally velarized ("dark", [ɫ]). Diachronically, it was fully vocalized into /o/ in coda positions, as in past participle. In some dialects, notably Torlakian, that process did not take place, and can be syllabic as well. However, in the standard language, vocalic /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 in the surname Štarklj and  in njutn "newton".

In more detailed phonetic studies, the post-alveolars are described as apical  or retroflex. In most spoken Croatian idioms, as well as in some Bosnian, there is a complete or partial merger between post-alveolar and palatal affricates.

Alveolo-palatal fricatives are marginal phonemes, usually realized as. 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 monophthongal vowels: a, e, i, o, u. Although phonemic, the difference between long and short vowels is not represented in standard orthography. Unstressed vowels are shorter than the stressed ones by 30% (in case of short vowels) and 50% (in case of long vowels).

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, 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". Thus the reflex of long jat, which is spelled as a trigraph $⟨ije⟩$ in standard Croatian, Bosnian and Ijekavian Serbian, represents the sequence.

Stressed vowels carry one of the two basic tones, rising and falling.

Pitch accent
Shtokavian dialects allow two tones on stressed syllables, and have distinctive vowel length, and so distinguish four combinations of these, called pitch accent: short falling $⟨⟩$, short rising $⟨⟩$, long falling $⟨⟩$, and long rising $⟨⟩$.

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.

The accent is relatively free because it can be on any syllable except the last one. Accent alternations are very frequent in inflectional paradigms, both by 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: lònac (nominative sg.), (genitive sg.),  (nominative pl.),  (genitive pl.).

Although distinctions of pitch only occur on 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:

Examples are short falling as in nȅbo ; long falling as in pîvo ; short rising as in màskara ; long rising as in čokoláda. Unstressed long syllables can occur only after the accented syllable, as in d(j)èvōjka or dòstavljānje. There can be more than one post-accent length in a word, notably in genitive plural of nouns: kȍcka → kȍcākā. 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.
 * 1) Falling tone generally occurs in monosyllabic words or the first syllable of a word (pȃs, rȏg; bȁba, lȃđa; kȕćica, Karlovac). The only exception to this rule are the interjections, i.e. words uttered in the state of excitement (e.g., )
 * 2) Rising tone generally occurs in every syllable of a word except the ultimate and never in monosyllabics (vòda, lúka; lìvada, lúpānje; siròta, počétak; crvotòčina, oslobođénje).

Thus, monosyllabics generally have falling tone, whilst 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 only possible in the first accented syllable of polysyllabic words, whereas the opposition by lengths, long ~ short, is possible even in the non-accented syllable as well as in the post-accented syllable (but not in the pre-accented 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 mono- or disyllabic word. This stolen accent is always short, and may end up being either falling or rising on the proclitic. This phenomenon (accent shift to proclitic) is most frequent in the spoken idioms of Bosnia, in Serbian it is more limited (normally with the negation proclitic ne), and 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 the example → )

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" (Serbo-Croatian: ), 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 inanimate nouns, and genitive plural for certain type of masculine nouns:
 * bórac (nom. sg.) – (gen. sg.) –  (gen. pl.)
 * mòmak (nom. sg.) – (gen. sg.) –  (gen. pl.)
 * stòlac (nom. sg.) – (gen. sg.) –  (gen. pl.)
 * in genitive plural forms of feminine nouns ending in a consonent cluster:
 * dàska –, sèstra – , bȁčva –
 * in nominative singular indefinite masculine forms of adjectives and pronouns:
 * kràtak –, kàkāv – , sȁv –

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:


 * in vocative singular of masculine nouns, where it is triggered by the ending -e:
 * jùnāk → jȕnāče, vrȃg → vrȃže,  òrah →  It is, however, not caused by the same ending  in accusative plural: ,
 * in the present stem of certain verbs before the endings in :
 * pȅći – present stem ; pèčēm, but pèkū without palatalization before the 3rd person plural ending -u
 * strȉći – present stem ; strížem, but strígū without palatalization before the 3rd person plural ending -u
 * mȍći – present stem ; mȍžeš, but mògu, without the palatalization before the archaic 1st person singular ending -u
 * in aorist formation of some verbs:
 * rȅći – rèkoh (1st person singular aorist), as opposed to (2nd/3rd person singular aorist)
 * stȉći – stȉgoh (1st person singular aorist), as opposed to (2nd/3rd person singular aorist)
 * in derivation of certain classes of nouns and verbs:
 * mȕka → mȕčiti, zrȃk → zráčiti,  trȃg → trážiti
 * slúga → slúžiti, njȗh → njȕšiti
 * before the "fleeting a", and before the endings and several others:
 * dȃh → dášak, Kartága → Kartážanin,  bȏg → bȍžjī,  strȃh → strášan
 * a few words exhibit palatalization in which and  palatalize before vowels  and, yielding  and . Such  and  result from earlier  and  by the Slavic third palatalization (which may actually have occurred prior to one or both of the other palatalization processes). Such palatals have often been leveled out in various derived forms. For example:
 * strȋc – strȋče – stríčev, lòvac – lȏvče – lóvčev,  zȇc – zȇče – zȅčevi,  ȕlica – ȕličica,  ptȉca – ptȉčica – ptičùrina
 * vȉtēz – vȉtēže, knȇz – knȇže

There are some exceptions to the process of palatalization. The conditions are:
 * before the suffix
 * mȁčka • ма̏чка → mȁčkica, p(j)ȅga → p(j)ȅgica,  bùha → bùhica
 * before the suffix in adjectives derived from hypocoristic nouns:
 * báka → bákīn, zéko → zékīn,  máca → mácin

Doublets exist with adjectives derived with suffix from trisyllabic proper names:

Sibilantization
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:
 * /k/ → /ts/
 * /g/ → /z/
 * /x/ → /s/

before /i/. This alternation is prominently featured in several characteristic cases:
 * in the imperative forms of verbs with stem ending in /k/, /g/ and one verb in /x/:
 * pȅći – present stem ; pèci (2nd person singular imperative)
 * strȉći – present stem ; strízi (2nd person singular imperative)
 * vȓći – present stem ; vŕsi (2nd person singular imperative)
 * in masculine nominative plurals with the ending :
 * jùnāk →, kr̀čag → , prȍpūh →
 * in dative and locative singular of a-stem nouns (prevalently feminine):
 * mȃjka →, nòga → ,  snàha →
 * in dative, locative and instrumental of masculine o-stems:
 * jùnāk →, kr̀čag →
 * in the formation of imperfective verbs to perfective verbs
 * dȉgnuti – dȉzati, uzdàhnuti – ùzdisati (but first-person singular present: ùzdišēm)

In two cases there is an exception to sibilantization:
 * in nominative singular of masculine nouns:
 * in monosyllabic borrowings:
 * in toponyms in plural form, usually from a region where Kajkavian dialect is spoken:
 * some surnames that are not identical to some general noun of the standard language
 * with nouns having 'fleeting a' in the ending
 * in dative and locative case of feminine and masculine a-stems
 * in hypocorisms
 * in words whose stem ends in a single consonant:
 * in names and surnames
 * in nouns ending in
 * in some toponyms
 * in nouns ending in suffix -ka with stem-final sonorant:
 * in words whose stem ends in a single consonant:
 * in names and surnames
 * in nouns ending in
 * in some toponyms
 * in nouns ending in suffix -ka with stem-final sonorant:
 * in some toponyms
 * in nouns ending in suffix -ka with stem-final sonorant:
 * in nouns ending in suffix -ka with stem-final sonorant:
 * in nouns ending in suffix -ka with stem-final sonorant:

Doublets are allowed in the following cases:
 * nominative plural of some masculine borrowings:
 * in nominative plural of surnames who are identical with some general masculine noun:
 * in nominative plural of masculine nouns with "fleeting a" and the ending
 * in dative and locative of some feminine foponyms with stem ending in a single consonant:
 * in dative and locative of some toponyms ending in :
 * in dative and locative of some feminines ending in :
 * in dative and locative of some feminine foponyms with stem ending in a single consonant:
 * in dative and locative of some toponyms ending in :
 * in dative and locative of some feminines ending in :
 * in dative and locative of some feminines ending in :
 * in dative and locative of some feminines ending in :

Assimilation
There are two types of consonant assimilation: by voicing (jednačenje po zvučnosti) and by place of articulation (jednačenje po m(j)estu tvorbe).

Assimilation of voice
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. Sonorants are exempted from assimilation, so it affects only the following consonants:


 * (nominative → genitive, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)
 * (singular → plural, with fleeting a)

Furthermore,, and  don't have voiced counterparts, so they trigger the assimilation, but are not affected by it.

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.

Assimilation by place of articulation
Assimilation by place of articulation affects and  in front of (post)alveolars, as well as palatals  and , producing  or :





Simultaneously, assimilation by voicing is triggered if necessary.

L-vocalization
A historical in coda position has become  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 (meaning "table", "ox" and "salt").

Sample
The sample text is a reading of The North Wind and the Sun by a 57-year-old female announcer at the Croatian Television Network reading in a colloquial style.

Orthographic version (Croatian)
Sjeverni ledeni vjetar i Sunce su se prepirali o svojoj snazi. Stoga odluče da onome od njih pripadne pobjeda koji svuče čovjeka putnika. Vjetar započe snažno puhati, a budući da je čovjek čvrsto držao odjeću, navali on još jače. Čovjek pak, još jače od studeni pritisnut, navuče na sebe još više odjeće, dok se vjetar ne umori i prepusti ga tada Suncu. Ono u početku zasija umjereno. Kad je čovjek skinuo suvišak odjeće, povisi ono još jače žegu dok se čovjek, u nemogućnosti da odoli sunčevoj toplini, ne svu če i ne pođe na kupanje u rijeku tekućicu. Priča pokazuje da je često uspješnije uvjeravanje negoli nasilje.