90-463: Serbo-Croatian , Croato-Serbian , Serbo-Croat or Croato-Serb , refers to a South Slavic language that is the primary language of Serbia , Croatia , Bosnia and Herzegovina , and Montenegro , as well as a minority language in Kosovo . Serbo-Croatian , Serbo-Croat , Croato-Serbian , Croato-Serb , Serbian–Croatian , or Croatian–Serbian may also refer to any shared aspects of Serbia and Croatia, or
180-610: A second language . Bosnian is spoken by 2.7 million people worldwide, chiefly Bosniaks , including 2.0 million in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 200,000 in Serbia and 40,000 in Montenegro. Montenegrin is spoken by 300,000 people globally. The notion of Montenegrin as a separate standard from Serbian is relatively recent. In the 2011 census, around 229,251 Montenegrins, of the country's 620,000, declared Montenegrin as their native language. That figure
270-403: 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
360-489: A Yugoslav state was established. From the very beginning, there were slightly different literary Serbian and Croatian standards, although both were based on the same dialect of Shtokavian, Eastern Herzegovinian . In the 20th century, Serbo-Croatian served as the lingua franca of the country of Yugoslavia , being the sole official language in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (when it was called "Serbo-Croato-Slovenian"), and afterwards
450-515: A complete or partial merger between /tʂ, dʐ/ and palatal affricates /tɕ, dʑ/ . where most Croatian and some Bosnian speakers merge the pairs č, ć /tʂ, tɕ/ and dž, đ /dʐ, dʑ/ , into [t͡ʃ] and [d͡ʒ] . Alveolo-palatal fricatives [ɕ, ʑ] are marginal phonemes, usually realized as consonant clusters [sj, zj] . However, the emerging Montenegrin standard has proposed two additional letters , Latin ⟨Ś⟩ , ⟨Ź⟩ and Cyrillic ⟨С́⟩ , ⟨З́⟩ , for
540-596: A dictionary, and a committee of Serbian and Croatian linguists was asked to prepare a pravopis . During the sixties both books were published simultaneously in Ijekavian Latin in Zagreb and Ekavian Cyrillic in Novi Sad. Yet Croatian linguists claim that it was an act of unitarianism. The evidence supporting this claim is patchy: Croatian linguist Stjepan Babić complained that the television transmission from Belgrade always used
630-416: A distinction between the two, and again in independent Bosnia and Herzegovina , "Bosnian", "Croatian", and "Serbian" were considered to be three names of a single official language. Croatian linguist Dalibor Brozović advocated the term Serbo-Croatian as late as 1988, claiming that in an analogy with Indo-European, Serbo-Croatian does not only name the two components of the same language, but simply charts
720-466: 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
810-547: A language law that promulgated Croatian linguistic purism as a policy that tried to implement a complete elimination of Serbisms and internationalisms. On January 15, 1944, the Anti-Fascist Council of the People's Liberation of Yugoslavia ( AVNOJ ) declared Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, and Macedonian to be equal in the entire territory of Yugoslavia. In 1945 the decision to recognize Croatian and Serbian as separate languages
900-505: A large part of the nations have lived side by side under foreign overlords. During that period, the language was referred to under a variety of names, such as "Slavic" in general or "Serbian", "Croatian" or "Bosnian" in particular. In a classicizing manner, it was also referred to as " Illyrian ". The process of linguistic standardization of Serbo-Croatian was originally initiated in the mid-19th-century Vienna Literary Agreement by Croatian and Serbian writers and philologists, decades before
990-513: A number of writing systems: The oldest texts since the 11th century are in Glagolitic , and the oldest preserved text written completely in the Latin alphabet is Red i zakon sestara reda Svetog Dominika , from 1345. The Arabic alphabet had been used by Bosniaks ; Greek writing is out of use there, and Arabic and Glagolitic persisted so far partly in religious liturgies. The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet
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#17330861622631080-603: A part of the Glagolitic service as late as the middle of the 19th century. The earliest known Croatian Church Slavonic Glagolitic manuscripts are the Glagolita Clozianus and the Vienna Folia from the 11th century. The beginning of written Serbo-Croatian can be traced from the tenth century and on when Serbo-Croatian medieval texts were written in four scripts: Latin , Glagolitic , Early Cyrillic , and Bosnian Cyrillic ( bosančica/bosanica ). Serbo-Croatian competed with
1170-500: A result of interaction between words: Also, there are some exceptions, mostly applied to foreign words and compounds, that favor morphological/etymological over phonetic spelling: One systemic exception is that the consonant clusters ds and dš are not respelled as ts and tš (although d tends to be unvoiced in normal speech in such clusters): Only a few words are intentionally "misspelled", mostly in order to resolve ambiguity: Through history, this language has been written in
1260-424: A separate Montenegrin standard. Like other South Slavic languages, Serbo-Croatian has a simple phonology , with the common five-vowel system and twenty-five consonants. Its grammar evolved from Common Slavic , with complex inflection , preserving seven grammatical cases in nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. Verbs exhibit imperfective or perfective aspect , with a moderately complex tense system. Serbo-Croatian
1350-469: A short tonic e, or leave vs. leaving? for a long tonic i, due to the prosody of final stressed syllables in English. General accent rules in the standard language: There are no other rules for accent placement, thus the accent of every word must be learned individually; furthermore, in inflection, accent shifts are common, both in type and position (the so-called " mobile paradigms "). The second rule
1440-475: A single language with two equal variants that have developed around Zagreb (western) and Belgrade (eastern)". The agreement insisted on the equal status of Cyrillic and Latin scripts, and of Ekavian and Ijekavian pronunciations. It also specified that Serbo-Croatian should be the name of the language in official contexts, while in unofficial use the traditional Serbian and Croatian were to be retained. Matica hrvatska and Matica srpska were to work together on
1530-405: A stem change. The imperfective aspect typically indicates that the action is unfinished, in progress, or repetitive; while the perfective aspect typically denotes that the action was completed, instantaneous, or of limited duration. Some Štokavian tenses (namely, aorist and imperfect) favor a particular aspect (but they are rarer or absent in Čakavian and Kajkavian). Actually, aspects "compensate" for
1620-522: A vote of the members of the parliament; "Yugoslavian" was opted for by the majority and legislated as the official language of the Triune Kingdom . The Austrian Empire , suppressing Pan-Slavism at the time, did not confirm this decision and legally rejected the legislation, but in 1867 finally settled on "Croatian or Serbian" instead. During the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina ,
1710-413: Is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia , Croatia , Bosnia and Herzegovina , and Montenegro . It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties , namely Serbian , Croatian , Bosnian , and Montenegrin . South Slavic languages historically formed a dialect continuum . The turbulent history of the area, particularly due to the expansion of
1800-555: Is a pro-drop language with flexible word order, subject–verb–object being the default. It can be written in either localized variants of Latin ( Gaj's Latin alphabet , Montenegrin Latin ) or Cyrillic ( Serbian Cyrillic , Montenegrin Cyrillic ), and the orthography is highly phonemic in all standards. Despite many linguistical similarities, the traits that separate all standardized varieties are clearly identifiable, although these differences are considered minimal. Serbo-Croatian
1890-493: 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: /ʒěliːm/ → /ne ʒěliːm/ ). 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" ( Serbo-Croatian : nepóstojānō
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#17330861622631980-557: 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 /e/ in inflection, and before /j, i, e/ and some other segments in word formation. This alternation
2070-696: 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
2160-510: Is likely to increase, due to the country's independence and strong institutional backing of the Montenegrin language. Serbo-Croatian is also a second language of many Slovenians and Macedonians , especially those born during the time of Yugoslavia. According to the 2002 census, Serbo-Croatian and its variants have the largest number of speakers of the minority languages in Slovenia. Outside
2250-406: Is normally voiced or voiceless if the last consonant is normally voiceless. This rule does not apply to approximants – a consonant cluster may contain voiced approximants and voiceless consonants; as well as to foreign words ( Washington would be transcribed as VašinGton ), personal names and when consonants are not inside of one syllable. /r/ can be syllabic, playing the role of
2340-483: Is not different from other armies of multilingual states, or in other specific institutions, such as international air traffic control where English is used worldwide. All variants of Serbo-Croatian were used in state administration and republican and federal institutions. Both Serbian and Croatian variants were represented in respectively different grammar books, dictionaries, school textbooks and in books known as pravopis (which detail spelling rules). Serbo-Croatian
2430-456: Is not strictly obeyed, especially in borrowed words. Comparative and historical linguistics offers some clues for memorising the accent position: If one compares many standard Serbo-Croatian words to e.g. cognate Russian words, the accent in the Serbo-Croatian word will be one syllable before the one in the Russian word, with the rising tone. Historically, the rising tone appeared when the place of
2520-559: 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. /r/ can be syllabic , short or long, and carry rising or falling tone, e.g. kȓv ('blood'), sȑce ('heart'), sŕna ('deer'), mȉlosr̄đe ('compassion'). It
2610-606: 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
2700-537: 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, /f/ , /x/ and /ts/ 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,
2790-416: 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" (sibilarizácija/сибилариза́ција). It results in
Serbo-Croatian (disambiguation) - Misplaced Pages Continue
2880-500: Is spoken by 10 million people around the world, mostly in Serbia (7.8 million), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1.2 million), and Montenegro (300,000). Besides these, Serbian minorities are found in Kosovo , North Macedonia and in Romania . In Serbia, there are about 760,000 second-language speakers of Serbian, including Hungarians in Vojvodina and the 400,000 estimated Roma. In Kosovo , Serbian
2970-634: Is spoken by the members of the Serbian minority which approximates between 70,000 and 100,000. Familiarity of Kosovar Albanians with Serbian varies depending on age and education, and exact numbers are not available. Croatian is spoken by 6.8 million people in the world, including 4.1 million in Croatia and 600,000 in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A small Croatian minority that lives in Italy, known as Molise Croats , have somewhat preserved traces of Croatian. In Croatia, 170,000, mostly Italians and Hungarians , use it as
3060-455: Is still present even in the plural (unlike Russian and, in part, the Čakavian dialect ). They also have two numbers : singular and plural. However, some consider there to be three numbers ( paucal or dual, too), since (still preserved in closely related Slovene ) after two ( dva , dvije / dve ), three ( tri ) and four ( četiri ), and all numbers ending in them (e.g. twenty-two, ninety-three, one hundred four, but not twelve through fourteen)
3150-547: Is the only Slavic language with a pitch accent (simple tone ) system. This feature is present in some other Indo-European languages , such as Norwegian , Ancient Greek , and Punjabi . Neo-Shtokavian Serbo-Croatian, which is used as the basis for standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian, has four "accents", which involve either a rising or falling tone on either long or short vowels, with optional post-tonic lengths: The tone stressed vowels can be approximated in English with set vs. setting? said in isolation for
3240-421: Is typically realized by inserting a preceding or succeeding non-phonemic vocalic glide . /l/ is generally velarized or "dark" [ ɫ ] . Diachronically, it was fully vocalized into /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 /l/ can be syllabic as well. However, in
3330-401: Is typically referred to by names of its standardized varieties: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin; it is rarely referred to by names of its sub-dialects, such as Bunjevac . In the language itself, it is typically known as srpskohrvatski / српскохрватски "Serbo-Croatian", hrvatskosrpski / хрватскoсрпски "Croato-Serbian", or informally naški / нашки "ours". Throughout
3420-476: The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia . In the 9th century , Old Church Slavonic was adopted as the language of the liturgy in churches serving various Slavic nations. This language was gradually adapted to non-liturgical purposes and became known as the Croatian version of Old Slavonic. The two variants of the language, liturgical and non-liturgical, continued to be
3510-462: The Ottoman Empire , resulted in a patchwork of dialectal and religious differences. Due to population migrations, Shtokavian became the most widespread supradialect in the western Balkans, intruding westwards into the area previously occupied by Chakavian and Kajkavian . Bosniaks , Croats , and Serbs differ in religion and were historically often part of different cultural circles, although
3600-685: The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet , and Gaj and Daničić standardized the Croatian Latin alphabet , on the basis of vernacular speech phonemes and the principle of phonological spelling. In 1850 Serbian and Croatian writers and linguists signed the Vienna Literary Agreement , declaring their intention to create a unified standard. Thus a complex bi-variant language appeared, which the Serbs officially called "Serbo-Croatian" or "Serbian or Croatian" and
3690-609: The Valun tablet , dated to the 11th century, written in Glagolitic and Latin; and the Inscription of Župa Dubrovačka , a Glagolitic tablet dated to the 11th century. The Baška tablet from the late 11th century was written in Glagolitic. It is a large stone tablet found in the small Church of St. Lucy, Jurandvor on the Croatian island of Krk that contains text written mostly in Chakavian in
Serbo-Croatian (disambiguation) - Misplaced Pages Continue
3780-596: The " Vinodol Codex " of 1288, both written in the Chakavian dialect. The Shtokavian dialect literature, based almost exclusively on Chakavian original texts of religious provenance ( missals , breviaries , prayer books ) appeared almost a century later. The most important purely Shtokavian vernacular text is the Vatican Croatian Prayer Book ( c. 1400 ). Both the language used in legal texts and that used in Glagolitic literature gradually came under
3870-455: The 1921 constitution. In 1929, the constitution was suspended, and the country was renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia , while the official language of Serbo-Croato-Slovene was reinstated in the 1931 constitution. In June 1941, the Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia began to rid the language of "Eastern" (Serbian) words, and shut down Serbian schools. The totalitarian dictatorship introduced
3960-581: The Balkans, there are over two million native speakers of the language(s), especially in countries which are frequent targets of immigration, such as Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, and the United States. Serbo-Croatian is a highly inflected language . Traditional grammars list seven cases for nouns and adjectives : nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , vocative , locative , and instrumental , reflecting
4050-550: The Constitution and law." In 2017, the " Declaration on the Common Language " ( Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku ) was signed by a group of NGOs and linguists from former Yugoslavia . It states that all standardized variants belong to a common polycentric language with equal status. About 18 million people declare their native language as either 'Bosnian', 'Croatian', 'Serbian', 'Montenegrin', or 'Serbo-Croatian'. Serbian
4140-460: The Croatian angular Glagolitic script. The Charter of Ban Kulin of 1189, written by Ban Kulin of Bosnia, was an early Shtokavian text, written in Bosnian Cyrillic. The luxurious and ornate representative texts of Serbo-Croatian Church Slavonic belong to the later era, when they coexisted with the Serbo-Croatian vernacular literature. The most notable are the " Missal of Duke Novak" from
4230-440: The Croatian variant because their languages are also Ekavian. This is a common situation in other pluricentric languages, e.g. the variants of German differ according to their prestige, the variants of Portuguese too. Moreover, all languages differ in terms of prestige: "the fact is that languages (in terms of prestige, learnability etc.) are not equal, and the law cannot make them equal". The 1946, 1953, and 1974 constitutions of
4320-611: The Croatian weekly journal Forum published the Declaration again in 2012, accompanied by a critical analysis. West European scientists judge the Yugoslav language policy as an exemplary one: although three-quarters of the population spoke one language, no single language was official on a federal level. Official languages were declared only at the level of constituent republics and provinces, and very generously: Vojvodina had five (among them Slovak and Romanian, spoken by 0.5 per cent of
4410-533: The Croats "Croato-Serbian", or "Croatian or Serbian". Yet, in practice, the variants of the conceived common literary language served as different literary variants, chiefly differing in lexical inventory and stylistic devices. The common phrase describing this situation was that Serbo-Croatian or "Croatian or Serbian" was a single language. In 1861, after a long debate, the Croatian Sabor put up several proposed names to
4500-763: The Dictionary for being unitaristic that were written by Croatian linguists. And finally, Croatian linguists ignored the fact that the material for the Pravopisni rječnik came from the Croatian Philological Society. Regardless of these facts, Croatian intellectuals brought the Declaration on the Status and Name of the Croatian Literary Language in 1967. On occasion of the publication's 45th anniversary,
4590-472: The Latin alphabet — which was true, but was not proof of unequal rights, but of frequency of use and prestige. Babić further complained that the Novi Sad Dictionary (1967) listed side by side words from both the Croatian and Serbian variants wherever they differed, which one can view as proof of careful respect for both variants, and not of unitarism. Moreover, Croatian linguists criticized those parts of
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#17330861622634680-612: The Lika region in northwestern Croatia (1368), "Evangel from Reims" (1395, named after the town of its final destination), Hrvoje's Missal from Bosnia and Split in Dalmatia (1404), and the first printed book in Serbo-Croatian, the Glagolitic Missale Romanum Glagolitice (1483). During the 13th century Serbo-Croatian vernacular texts began to appear, the most important among them being the "Istrian land survey" of 1275 and
4770-678: The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia did not name specific official languages at the federal level. The 1992 constitution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia , in 2003 renamed Serbia and Montenegro , stated in Article 15: "In the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Serbian language in its ekavian and ijekavian dialects and the Cyrillic script shall be official, while the Latin script shall be in official use as provided for by
4860-732: 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: Examples are short falling as in nȅbo ('sky') /ˈnêbo/ ; long falling as in pȋvo ('beer') /ˈpîːvo/ ; short rising as in màskara ('eye makeup') /ˈmǎskara/ ; long rising as in čokoláda ('chocolate') /t͡ʂokoˈlǎːda/ . Unstressed long syllables can occur only after
4950-462: The accent shifted to the preceding syllable (the so-called "Neo-Shtokavian retraction"), but the quality of this new accent was different – its melody still "gravitated" towards the original syllable. Most Shtokavian (Neo-Shtokavian) dialects underwent this shift, but Chakavian, Kajkavian and the Old-Shtokavian dialects did not. Accent diacritics are not used in the ordinary orthography, but only in
5040-600: The accented syllable, as in d(j)èvōjka ('girl') /ˈd(ј)ěvoːjka/ or dòstavljānje ('delivering') /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
5130-446: 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
5220-488: 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). The long Ijekavian reflex of Proto-Slavic jat is of disputed status. The prescriptive grammar Barić et al. (1997) published by
5310-435: The entire region in which the Serbo-Croatian language is spoken: Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian ( / ˌ s ɜːr b oʊ k r oʊ ˈ eɪ ʃ ən / SUR -boh-kroh- AY -shən ) – also called Serbo-Croat ( / ˌ s ɜːr b oʊ ˈ k r oʊ æ t / SUR -boh- KROH -at ), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian ( SCB ), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian ( BCS ), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian ( BCMS ) –
5400-465: The equivalent [ˈlo˥nats˥, ˈloːn˥tsa˥, ˈloːn˥tsi˩, ˈlo˥naˑ˩tsaˑ˩] . Transcriptions may also use secondary stress, as in Swedish : [ˈloˌnats, ˈloːnˌtsa, ˈloːntsi, ˈlonaˑtsaˑ] . Ivić and Lehiste were not the first scholars to notice this; in fact, Leonhard Masing [ et ] made a very similar discovery decades earlier, but it was ignored due to his being a foreigner, and because it contradicted
5490-401: 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
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#17330861622635580-550: The following alternations before /i/ : 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: There are two types of consonant assimilation : by voicing ( jednačenje po zvučnosti ) and by place of articulation ( jednačenje po m(j)estu tvorbe ). All consonants in clusters are neutralized by voicing, but Serbo-Croatian does not exhibit final-obstruent devoicing as most other Slavic languages do. Assimilation
5670-511: The following decades, and accepted by Croatian Zagreb grammarians in 1854 and 1859. At that time, Serb and Croat lands were still part of the Ottoman and Austrian Empires . Officially, the language was called variously Serbo-Croat, Croato-Serbian, Serbian and Croatian, Croatian and Serbian, Serbian or Croatian, Croatian or Serbian. Unofficially, Serbs and Croats typically called the language "Serbian" or "Croatian", respectively, without implying
5760-484: 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
5850-463: The genitive singular is used, and after all other numbers five ( pet ) and up, the genitive plural is used. (The number one [ jedan ] is treated as an adjective.) Adjectives are placed in front of the noun they modify and must agree in both case and number with it. There are seven tenses for verbs: past , present , future , exact future, aorist , imperfect , and pluperfect ; and three moods : indicative , imperative , and conditional . However,
5940-456: The history of the South Slavs , the vernacular , literary, and written languages (e.g. Chakavian, Kajkavian, Shtokavian) of the various regions and ethnicities developed and diverged independently. Prior to the 19th century, they were collectively called "Illyria", "Slavic", "Slavonian", "Bosnian", "Dalmatian", "Serbian" or "Croatian". Since the nineteenth century, the term Illyrian or Illyric
6030-410: The influence of the vernacular, which considerably affected its phonological , morphological , and lexical systems. From the 14th and the 15th centuries, both secular and religious songs at church festivals were composed in the vernacular. Writers of early Serbo-Croatian religious poetry ( začinjavci ) gradually introduced the vernacular into their works. These začinjavci were the forerunners of
6120-476: The language of all three nations in this territory was declared "Bosnian" until the death of administrator von Kállay in 1907, at which point the name was changed to "Serbo-Croatian". With unification of the first the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes – the approach of Karadžić and the Illyrians became dominant. The official language was called "Serbo-Croato-Slovenian" ( srpsko-hrvatsko-slovenački ) in
6210-472: The latter three tenses are typically used only in Shtokavian writing, and the time sequence of the exact future is more commonly formed through an alternative construction. In addition, like most Slavic languages, the Shtokavian verb also has one of two aspects : perfective or imperfective . Most verbs come in pairs, with the perfective verb being created out of the imperfective by adding a prefix or making
6300-425: The limits of the region in which it is spoken and includes everything between the limits ('Bosnian' and 'Montenegrin'). Today, use of the term "Serbo-Croatian" is controversial due to the prejudice that nation and language must match. It is still used for lack of a succinct alternative, though alternative names have emerged, such as Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS), which is often seen in political contexts such as
6390-401: The linguistic or language-learning literature (e.g. dictionaries, orthography and grammar books). However, there are very few minimal pairs where an error in accent can lead to misunderstanding. Serbo-Croatian orthography is almost entirely phonetic. Thus, most words should be spelled as they are pronounced. In practice, the writing system does not take into account allophones which occur as
6480-507: The more established literary languages of Latin and Old Slavonic. Old Slavonic developed into the Serbo-Croatian variant of Church Slavonic between the 12th and 16th centuries. Among the earliest attestations of Serbo-Croatian are: the Humac tablet , dating from the 10th or 11th century, written in Bosnian Cyrillic and Glagolitic; the Plomin tablet , dating from the same era, written in Glagolitic;
6570-481: The official language of four out of six republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia . The breakup of Yugoslavia affected language attitudes, so that social conceptions of the language separated along ethnic and political lines. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnian has likewise been established as an official standard in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and there is an ongoing movement to codify
6660-402: The original seven cases of Proto-Slavic , and indeed older forms of Serbo-Croatian itself. However, in modern Shtokavian the locative has almost merged into dative (the only difference is based on accent in some cases), and the other cases can be shown declining; namely: Like most Slavic languages, there are mostly three genders for nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter, a distinction which
6750-400: The orthography does not record it, usually to maintain the etymology clearer. Assimilation by place of articulation affects /s/ and /z/ in front of (post)alveolars /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /t͡ʂ/, /d͡ʐ/, /tɕ/, /dʑ/ , as well as palatals /ʎ/ and /ɲ/ , producing /ʃ/ or /ʒ/ : Simultaneously, assimilation by voicing is triggered if necessary. A historical /l/ in coda position has become /o/ and
6840-448: The phonemic sequences /sj, zj/ , which may be realized phonetically 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 /a, e, i, o, u/ . Although
6930-502: 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 [ˈlónáts, ˈlóːntsá, ˈlóːntsì, ˈlónàˑtsàˑ] or
7020-457: The population), and Kosovo four (Albanian, Turkish, Romany and Serbo-Croatian). Newspapers, radio and television studios used sixteen languages, fourteen were used as languages of tuition in schools, and nine at universities. Only the Yugoslav People's Army used Serbo-Croatian as the sole language of command, with all other languages represented in the army's other activities—however, this
7110-408: The relative lack of tenses, because verbal aspect determines whether the act is completed or in progress in the referred time. The Serbo-Croatian vowel system is simple, with only five vowels in Shtokavian. All vowels are monophthongs . The oral vowels are as follows: The vowels can be short or long, but the phonetic quality does not change depending on the length. In a word, vowels can be long in
7200-525: The rich literary production of the 16th-century literature, which, depending on the area, was Chakavian-, Kajkavian-, or Shtokavian-based. The language of religious poems, translations, miracle and morality plays contributed to the popular character of medieval Serbo-Croatian literature. One of the earliest dictionaries, also in the Slavic languages as a whole, was the Bosnian–Turkish Dictionary of 1631 authored by Muhamed Hevaji Uskufi and
7290-413: The same lexeme can exhibit all four accents: lònac /ˈlǒnats/ ('pot' nominative sg.), lónca /ˈlǒːntsa/ (genitive singular), lȏnci /ˈlôːntsi/ (nominative plural), lȍnācā /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
7380-646: The sequence /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). 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
7470-595: 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 /ʎ̩/ in the surname Štarklj and /n̩/ in njutn (' newton '). The retroflex consonants /ʂ, ʐ, tʂ, dʐ/ are, in more detailed phonetic studies, described as apical [ʃ̺, ʒ̺, t̺ʃ̺ʷ, d̺ʒ̺ʷ] . In most spoken Croatian idioms, as well as in some Bosnian, they are postalveolar ( /ʃ, ʒ, t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ/ ) instead, and there could be
7560-403: The stressed syllable and the syllables following it, never in the ones preceding it. The consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants. As in English, voice is phonemic , but aspiration is not. In consonant clusters all consonants are either voiced or voiceless. All the consonants are voiced if the last consonant
7650-447: The syllable nucleus in certain words (occasionally, it can even have a long accent). For example, the tongue-twister navrh brda vrba mrda involves four words with syllabic /r/ . A similar feature exists in Czech , Slovak , and Macedonian . Very rarely other sonorants can be syllabic, like /l/ (in bicikl ), /ʎ/ (surname Štarklj ), /n/ (unit njutn ), as well as /m/ and /ɲ/ in slang . Apart from Slovene , Serbo-Croatian
7740-416: Was a kind of soft standardisation. However, legal equality could not dampen the prestige Serbo-Croatian had: since it was the language of three quarters of the population, it functioned as an unofficial lingua franca. And within Serbo-Croatian, the Serbian variant, with twice as many speakers as the Croatian, enjoyed greater prestige, reinforced by the fact that Slovene and Macedonian speakers preferred it to
7830-570: Was reversed in favor of a single Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian language. In the Communist -dominated second Yugoslavia , ethnic issues eased to an extent, but the matter of language remained blurred and unresolved. In 1954, major Serbian and Croatian writers, linguists and literary critics, backed by Matica srpska and Matica hrvatska signed the Novi Sad Agreement , which in its first conclusion stated: "Serbs, Croats and Montenegrins share
7920-556: Was revised by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in the 19th century. Serbo-Croatian phonology 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
8010-528: Was used quite often (thus creating confusion with the Illyrian language ). Although the word Illyrian was used on a few occasions before , its widespread usage began after Ljudevit Gaj and several other prominent linguists met at Ljudevit Vukotinović 's house to discuss the issue in 1832. The term Serbo-Croatian was first used by Jacob Grimm in 1824, popularized by the Viennese philologist Jernej Kopitar in
8100-451: Was written in the Arebica script. In the mid-19th century, Serbian (led by self-taught writer and folklorist Vuk Stefanović Karadžić ) and most Croatian writers and linguists (represented by the Illyrian movement and led by Ljudevit Gaj and Đuro Daničić ), proposed the use of the most widespread dialect, Shtokavian , as the base for their common standard language. Karadžić standardised
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