This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Stress across a word’s forms: where it changes and how to hear it
In “The four accents” the pair rúka / rȗku flashed past: one word, two cases. The stress stayed on the same syllable but changed its tone: in rúka the voice goes up on the stressed syllable, in rȗku it goes down. This happens all the time. In Serbian the accent is not a label stuck on a word for good: it belongs to the form. As you decline a noun or conjugate a verb, you change the place of the stress, its tone or its length, sometimes all three at once.
You do not need to learn the accent type of every word: native speakers do not do that either. The aim is practical: to know where the stress moves in common words, to read marked forms in a dictionary correctly, and to recognise the moved stress by ear. The recurring patterns are few, and the most frequent ones can be heard every day. These patterns explain why Serbs say ȕ vodu “into the water”, with the stress on u, and not “u vòdu”, why žèna and žénā are different cases of one word, and why grȃd “city” sounds different after “in”: u grádu.
What can change: place, tone, length
An accent, as you remember from “The four accents”, is the tone and the length of the stressed syllable, plus its place. Any of the three can change, separately or together.
The long unstressed vowel of the previous lesson, “Length after the stress”, changes too: it comes and goes with the ending, and sometimes it is the only difference between two forms.
The fixed accent: the calm majority
Start with the good news: in most Serbian words the accent is fixed. Wherever it stands in the dictionary form, it stays in every case, and all you need is the right place of the stress.
All is quiet here except for one cell: the genitive plural changes the sound even of the tamest words (knjȋgā, sestárā). And a general observation: a mobile accent belongs to the most frequent and oldest words; the longer and more bookish a word, the more likely its accent stays in place.
Feminine nouns: a falling accent in the accusative
This is one of the most noticeable changes in the language, and the first one worth mastering. In a group of common feminine nouns in -a the accusative singular gets a falling accent on the first syllable: on the stressed syllable the voice goes down instead of up. The same falling accent is heard in the nominative plural.
The same group includes bráda — brȃdu (beard, chin), dúša — dȗšu (soul) and strána — strȃnu (side). But žèna and sèstra are not in it: their accusatives are žènu, sèstru, and the accent does not change. Whether a word belongs to the group only a dictionary can tell you, but such short everyday words are few, and nearly all of them are in front of you.
Why should a learner care? Because only a falling accent can jump onto a preposition (the rule from “The four accents”). In the nominative these words have a rising accent, and the shift is impossible; in the accusative the accent is falling, and the preposition takes the stress:
The stress moves to the preposition, but the length stays in the word, as in nȅ znām. In English into the water the little word stays weak; in ȕ vodu it is the stressed syllable of the phrase.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
Stress across a word’s forms in brief
The accent belongs to the form, not the word. Place, tone and length can change, separately or together: grȃd — grȁdovi (length), rúka — rȗku (tone), govòriti — gòvorīm (place), žèna — žénā (length twice).