The consonant inventory

Lesson opening

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

The consonants as a system

You know the individual letters already, including the special č ć š ž đ dž. This lesson looks at the consonants as a system: how they pair up as voiced and voiceless, where in the mouth they are made and how the system differs from the English one you carry in your ear. That view “from above” explains the commonest accent mistakes, and why Serbian has 25 consonants: about as many as English, but not the same 25.

Eighteen of them are sounds English has too. What needs work is the handful of new sounds, a few English habits that follow you into Serbian, and the way the system is built. Once you see that, the alternations waiting in later lessons fall into place: the way a consonant changes inside one root, as in ruka, “hand”, but u ruci, “in the hand”.

What comes for free

Eighteen Serbian consonants are sounds you already make in English. Here they are with their anchors:

That leaves seven that English lacks as single sounds: c (the “ts” of cats, as one sound, even at the start of a word), ć and đ (the front of the tongue flat against the palate: close to the t of British tune and the d of British duty), lj and nj (the “lli” of million and the “ny” of canyon, each as one sound), h (a light version of the ch in Scottish loch) and r (tapped or rolled). You met them all in “The Latin alphabet” and “Special letters č ć š ž đ dž”; here we place them in the system.

Voiced and voiceless: seven pairs

The heart of the system is the voiced/voiceless pairs. In each pair the two sounds are made the same way and in the same place; only the vocal cords differ, vibrating for the voiced sound and still for the voiceless one. English works the same way (bat/pat, dog/dock): put your fingers on your throat, say “zzz” and then “sss”, and feel the voice switch off. Serbian has seven such pairs:

Three consonants have no partner: c, h and f are voiceless loners. And a whole row of voiced sounds has no voiceless mate: the sonorants m n nj l lj r j v, made with the air flowing freely, always voiced and outside the pairing game. The pairs matter: voicing assimilation runs exactly along them, when two consonants from the pairs meet inside a word and the first adjusts to the second. That gets its own lesson, “Voicing assimilation”.

Cheat sheet

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

The consonants as a system

25 consonants (30 letters minus the 5 vowels a e i o u). Three axes: voicing (with or without the voice), place and manner of articulation. No hard/soft axis: a Serbian consonant has one value, whatever follows. A consonant is suglasnik, a vowel samoglasnik.

Eighteen you already have

p, t, k never take the English puff of air. Seven new: c (ts of cats), ć/đ (tongue flat at the palate: British tune/duty), lj (lli of million), nj (ny of canyon), h (a light Scottish loch), r (tapped or rolled).

Seven voiced/voiceless pairs

Unpaired: the voiceless loners c, h, f and the sonorants m n nj l lj r j v (always voiced). Voicing assimilation inside words runs along these pairs.

Place of articulation

The new sounds sit in the palatal zone; k g h shift there under palatalisation: ruka → ruč-, bog → bož-.

Manner of articulation

Place + manner = a sound’s address: c, č, ć are all affricates, but c is dental, č and ć palatal. Alternations run along this map.

One consonant, one value

No “soft twins”: only the inherently palatal ć, đ, lj, nj, j. Hence 25, not the thirty-plus of Slavic languages with hard/soft pairs.

A voiced ending stays voiced

grad = “grad” (not “grat”), Beograd, led = “led” (let is “flight”), nož = “nozh”, zub = “zub”. Assimilation works inside the word and shows in the spelling: težak → teška.