Capitalisation

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

Capital letters: the Serbian rules

Capital letters (in Serbian veliko slovo, "the big letter") work mostly the way you would expect: sentence beginnings and proper names. But there is a handful of precise differences that trip up learners from both directions — those carrying English habits and those carrying Russian ones. In this short lesson we sort those differences out, so that you write ponedeljak and srpski lowercase with confidence, and Novi Sad and Srbin with capitals.

Lowercase where an English hand reaches for a capital

Four categories of words Serbian stubbornly writes with a small letter — and every one of them is capitalized in English, so the habit will fight you on every line:

So "on Monday, the third of May, I'm reading a Serbian book" comes out all lowercase in Serbian: u ponedeljak, trećeg maja, čitam srpsku knjigu. Hold on to one exception amid this calm — the names of peoples used as nouns.

The people-noun takes a capital, the "people" adjective does not

Here is the one distinction Serbian draws with a fine blade. The name of a people as a noun is a proper name and takes a capital. The adjective derived from it is lowercase. Compare:

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

Capital letters: the Serbian rules

The capital (veliko slovo) goes on the first word of a sentence and on proper names: people (Ana, Marko), cities and countries (Beograd, Srbija), rivers, mountains, holidays, publications. Everything else — lowercase.

Always lowercase (unlike English)

The people-noun — capital, the adjective — small

Compound names

The capital goes to the first word and to any word that is a proper name in its own right. The generic word (gora, more, reka, ostrvo, ulica) stays lowercase.

Holidays and titles of works

The same principle: capitalize the first word (plus proper names inside), the rest — lowercase.