B2 — upper-intermediateVariation: dialect, standard and substandard

How people really talk

Lesson opening

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

How people really talk: colloquial and substandard Serbian

Textbooks teach the language people write. The street speaks another, and the first encounter is unsettling: instead of the expected Da li hoćeš da idemo? you hear Oš da idemo?, instead of Nemoj to da radiš you get Nemo' to da radiš, and every five seconds a bre clicks between the words. Nothing exotic: this is the same Serbian, squeezed by speed and warmed by the closeness of the speakers, much as English “Do you want to go?” becomes “D’you wanna go?”.

Fast speech: what gets swallowed

Fluent speech compresses words by a few fixed rules. Learn them, and half of what you “can’t make out” decodes itself.

Examples

What happens	Full form → spoken form	Meaning
initial h drops (hv turns into f)	hajde → ajde, ajd, aj; hoćeš → oćeš; hvala → fala; hleb → leb	come on; you want; thanks; bread
hoćeš li contracts	hoćeš li → oćeš li → oćeš → oš	do you want?
in place of da li you hear je li, and it shrinks	da li → je li → je l' → jel'	question marker: “is it that…?”
the last syllable drops	nemoj → nemo'; vidiš → viš; ništa → ništ'; hajdemo → ajmo	don’t; you see; nothing; let’s go
two words fuse	šta ćeš → štaš; ne znam → neznam; dobar dan → 'bar dan	what can you do; I don’t know; good afternoon

All this is for hearing, not reproducing: a foreigner carefully pronouncing Oš štaš will convince no one that it comes from fluency. Your own ajde, ajmo and jel': that is where the safe list ends.

A word about h itself (the rasp of Scottish loch). In the dialects of Šumadija and Vojvodina, which means at the base of Belgrade city speech, it weakened long ago and vanished from many words. Some of these losses the standard itself made official: the standard Serbian words are uvo, muva, duvan, kuvati, suv (ear, fly, tobacco, to cook, dry), with v where the h was, while uho, muha, duhan, kuhati, suh sound Croatian or bookish (on the neighbouring standards, see “Serbian, Croatian & Bosnian”). Colloquial oćeš and leb continue that movement; the standard just no longer lets them in.

Deeper history

How Vuk brought back the letter h

The home dialect of Vuk Karadžić, from the village of Tršić, had no h, and in his first books, the grammar Pismenica (1814) and the dictionary Srpski rječnik (1818), Vuk wrote without it: oću, rana, lad for hoću, hrana, hlad. For twenty years critics reproached him for dropping a letter alive among the Serbs of Dubrovnik and the Bay of Kotor and in church tradition. Vuk listened for himself and gave in: in the preface to Narodne srpske poslovice (Cetinje, 1836) he announced that he was bringing h into his spelling, because the people there pronounce it clearly. The letter returned to writing, but not to the speech of Šumadija, where it is missing to this day. You hear ajde and oćeš because the compromise won in writing, not in speech.

Colloquial grammar: one bi for every person

The second layer is forms. Here speech drifts further from the standard, and here runs the line between “colloquial” and “uneducated”.

Examples

Standard	What people say	Status
ja bih, mi bismo, vi biste	ja bi, mi bi, vi bi	ja bi very common, mi bi and vi bi less so; in writing, a mistake
rekao, došao, mogao, znao	reko, došo, mogo, zno	normal in speech across Šumadija and Belgrade; in writing, the full form
treba da idem	trebam da idem	substandard in Serbia (the Croatian standard has trebam ići)
Mama je rekla da dođeš. Jesi li platio?	Mama rekla da dođeš. Jesi platio?	usual in conversation; writing puts je and li back

The first row you know from “Conditional I”. The second you know from “L-vocalisation”: in fast speech final -ao contracts to -o, which is why the past participle (the -o/-ao form of the past tense) is shorter in songs and conversation than in the dictionary. The third comes from “treba & valja”: the Serbian standard keeps treba da impersonal, one form for every person. In the fourth, fast speech swallows je in the past tense and li in a question (“Formal vs informal register”).

Only je, the helper of the third person, is swallowed; with “I” and “you” (sam, si) it stays, even in casual talk: “Ja bio kod lekara” for “I was at the doctor’s” is not colloquial but simply wrong (see “The perfect (perfekat)”); say Bio sam kod lekara. And the other way round: not everything heard more often in speech is substandard. Ja ću da radim and Moram da idem are good Serbian in speech and in writing (“Future I” and “da-clause vs infinitive”).

Deeper history

Reko, reka, rekao: how the people shortened the participle

Contracting -ao to -o is not sloppiness but the badge of a dialect. The Serbian dialectologist Pavle Ivić, in Dijalektologija srpskohrvatskog jezika (Novi Sad, 1956), describes it as one of the identifying features of the dialect of Šumadija and Vojvodina, where people say reko, doš'o, pevo. In some southern dialects the same combination contracts differently, to -a: reka, doša. The Eastern Herzegovinian dialect, on which the standard rests, kept the full rekao, which is why that form stands in the dictionary. Belgrade speaks like Šumadija and writes like Eastern Herzegovina, and the gap between reko and rekao is the seam between two dialects inside one city. The next lesson, “Dialects of Serbian”, maps the zones.

Cheat sheet

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

How people really talk: cheat sheet

Principle: recognise almost everything, say the green zone, write only the standard.

1. Sounds: what gets swallowed

Rule	Standard → speech	Meaning
initial h drops (hv → f)	hajde → ajde, aj; hoćeš → oćeš; hvala → fala; hleb → leb	come on; you want; thanks; bread
questions contract	hoćeš li → oćeš → oš; da li → je li → je l' → jel'	do you want?; question marker
word endings drop	nemoj → nemo'; vidiš → viš; ništa → ništ'; hajdemo → ajmo	don’t; you see; nothing; let’s go
words fuse	šta ćeš → štaš; ne znam → neznam; dobar dan → 'bar dan	what can you do; I don’t know; good afternoon

The standard itself has no h in uvo, muva, duvan, kuvati, suv (bookish or Croatian: uho, muha, duhan, kuhati, suh). fala = fast hvala; vala = the particle “honestly, I swear”.

2. Forms and phrases

Standard	Speech	Status
ja bih, mi bismo, vi biste	ja bi, mi bi, vi bi	ja bi common; a mistake in writing
rekao, došao, mogao, znao	reko, došo, mogo, zno	spoken (Šumadija, Belgrade)
treba da idem	trebam da idem	substandard in Serbia
Mama je rekla; Jesi li platio?	Mama rekla; Jesi platio?	spoken; write je, li
Markova sestra	sestra od Marka	spoken
Idem autobusom	Idem sa autobusom	substandard
u vezi s tim; uprkos tome	u vezi toga; uprkos toga	substandard
Milane, dođi!	Milan, dođi!	nominative for vocative
Idem kod lekara; ću da radim	the same	standard

3. Street words

Group	Words	To whom
intensifiers	bre, ma, pa, ono, znači; važi, može, nema šanse, ma jok	bre: friends; važi, može: anyone
address	brate, bato, burazeru, care, šefe, majstore, komšija	man to man; safest: majstore, komšija
“great”	super, ekstra, strava, mrak, ludilo, žestoko	super always; the rest, the nineties
“bad”	koma, bezveze, frka, smor, gužva	Nema frke! “No problem!”
vulgar	jebiga (jbg) and kin	understand only

Šatrovački swaps syllables; recognise only: brate → tebra, zdravo → vozdra, nemoj → mojne; adverb šatro “sort of”.

4. Zone map

Green (say): ajde, ajmo, super, važi, može, nema veze, nema frke, Šta ima?, Gde si?, majstore, komšija
Yellow (friends your age): bre, brate, care, koma, bezveze, frka, ekstra, lova, klopa
Red (understand only): tebra, vozdra, riba, matori, pandur, ćale, keva and the vulgar layer
Grey (hear, never write): ja bi, oćeš, trebam da, u vezi toga, sa autobusom

Belgrade: fast, bre, care. Vojvodina: drawn-out, German and Hungarian loans (paor, špajz, šrafciger), feminine bicikla. The south: dialect. The young: anglicisms (kul, hejt, random).