Serbo-Croatian phonology


is a South Slavic language with four national standards. The Eastern Herzegovinian Neo-Shtokavian dialect forms the basis for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian.
Standard Serbo-Croatian has 35 phonemes including vowel length : 25 consonants and 10 vowels, and a pitch accent, whereas Montenegrin has two more consonants.

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 contrast for most consonants.
can be syllabic, short or long, and carry rising or falling tone, e.g. kȓv, sȑce, sŕna, mȉlosr̄đe. 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 *radil > radio. 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 Vltava for instance, or debakl, bicikl. Very rarely other sonorants are syllabic, such as in the surname Štarklj and in njutn.
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.
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% and 50%.
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 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 allow two tones on stressed syllables and have distinctive vowel length and so distinguish four combinations, 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. normally bears a short rising tone on the final syllable in the speech of educated speakers. Further exceptions to this prescriptive rule are found in words such as fabrikànt, asistènt, apsolvènt, trafikànt This is relevant for Serbia, where educated speakers otherwise speak close to standard Serbian; 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. Different inflected forms of the same lexeme can exhibit all four accents: , lónca , lȏnci , lȍnācā .
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 or the equivalent. Ivić and Lehiste were not the first scholars to notice this; in fact, Leonhard Masing made a very similar discovery decades earlier, but it was ignored due to him 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
ȅshort vowel with falling tone
ȇlong vowel with falling tone
èshort vowel with rising tone
élong vowel with rising tone
enon-tonic short vowel
ēnon-tonic long vowel

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 dèvōjka 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, ; , ; . The only exception to this rule are interjections, words uttered in the state of excitement
  2. Rising tone generally occurs in any syllable of a word except the last one and so never occurs in monosyllabics.
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.
Proclitics, clitics that latch on to a following word, on the other hand, may "steal" a falling 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 is most frequent in the spoken idioms of Bosnia, as in Serbian it is more limited 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.

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:
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:
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". It results in the following alternations before :
This alternation is prominently featured in several characteristic cases:
In two cases there is an exception to sibilantization:
Doublets are allowed in the following cases:

Assimilation

There are two types of consonant assimilation: by voicing and by place of articulation.

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:
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 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.

Sample

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.

Phonemic transcription

Phonetic transcription

Orthographic version (Croatian)

Sjeverni ledeni vjetar i Sunce su se prepirali o svojoj snazi.