What pitch accent is
Lesson opening
This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
What pitch accent is
In “The five vowels” and “Syllabic r” we put one conversation off until later: Serbian vowels can be long or short, and on the stressed syllable the voice either climbs or falls, changing its tone. This is the Serbian pitch accent (also called tonal or musical accent). It sounds intimidating, but at the start you need no clever notation: only an idea of how the system works and one rule about where the stress falls. That rule alone brings your Serbian a good deal closer to a native speaker’s.
The main rule: the stress never falls on the last syllable
If you remember one thing from this lesson, make it this. In standard Serbian the stress never falls on the last syllable of a word of two or more syllables. In such a word any syllable can carry the stress except the very last one. One-syllable words do not count: if such a word is stressed, the stress is on its only syllable.
English has no such ban. It happily stresses the end of a word (hoTEL, toDAY, guiTAR) and of many foreign names (BerLIN, MaDRID). Serbian does the opposite: it keeps the stress towards the front of the word. Some everyday words (the stressed syllable is in capitals):
The practical upshot: in a Serbian word of several syllables, resist any urge to hit the end, especially in names, where English habits pull hardest. The stress is almost certainly further to the left, and on the very last syllable it never appears at all. The same goes for many foreign words: hotel is HO-tel in Serbian, not hoTEL.
The four accents, briefly, just to recognise them
We take the full system and its notation apart in a separate lesson, “The four accents”; here it is enough to see the whole thing at a glance. Serbian stress is built from two features, tone (rising, uzlazni, or falling, silazni) and length, dužina (a long or a short vowel), and their combinations give exactly four accents:
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
What pitch accent is
English stress is a stress accent: the stressed syllable is louder, its place is free (REcord / reCORD), and unstressed vowels weaken to “uh”. Serbian stress is a pitch accent: the stressed syllable stands out by the height and movement of the voice (the tone rises or falls), and the vowel itself is long or short. “Tone + length” gives four accents. Every vowel stays full.
Rule number one: never on the last syllable
In standard Serbian the stress never falls on the last syllable of a word of two or more syllables: any syllable can carry it except the last. One-syllable words do not count. English happily stresses the end (hoTEL, BerLIN); Serbian keeps the stress towards the front, in many foreign words too: hotel is HO-tel.
The four accents, for recognition
- There is also post-tonic length: an unstressed vowel after the stress can be long (dečak: stress on “de”, a long a).
- Falling accents occur only on the first syllable (or in a one-syllable word); rising ones on any syllable except the last.
- So the last syllable of a longer word is never stressed. Stress not at the start = rising tone; one syllable = falling tone.
- Terms: stress = akcenat / naglasak, length = dužina, tones = uzlazni (rising) and silazni (falling), syllable = slog (slovo is “letter”, reč is “word”).