This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
The four accents: two features, four marks
In the lesson “What pitch accent is” you learned the main points: Serbian stress is not a hammer blow but a movement of the voice, it is made of tone and length, and it never falls on the last syllable of a longer word. Back then we looked at the system from a distance. Now we come up close: we take the four accents one by one, learn to read their marks in a dictionary and on the app’s word card, find out which accent can stand where, and decide what to do with all this when an ordinary Serbian text carries no marks at all.
You do not need to learn the accent of every word by heart: Serbs do not memorise accents either, they know them from speech. The aim of this lesson is more modest and more useful. When you see a mark, you will know which syllable is stressed and whether its vowel is long, and you will read the word aloud; from the place of the stress you will predict the tone; and by ear you will tell which syllable of a familiar word is stressed. The realistic goal is the same as in the last lesson: a natural rhythm, not perfect tones.
A table of four cells
The whole system fits into four cells. The mark sits over the stressed vowel, just as you will see it in a dictionary and on the app’s word card.
Each accent has a name, and the Serbian names are transparent: length first, then tone, just like the English ones: kratko “short” + silazni “falling” = kratkosilazni, dugo “long” + uzlazni “rising” = dugouzlazni. Here are all four: what the voice does, and model words. Read the model words aloud, exaggerating the movement of the voice at first.
The marks are easy to read once you see their logic. The falling accents get “heavy” marks: the double grave ȁ (two short strokes, a short syllable) and the arc ȃ (one long sweep, a long one). The rising accents get light single strokes: the grave à (short) and the acute á (long). A mnemonic: double stroke or arc, the voice falls; a single stroke, it rises; a stroke leaning left means short, leaning right means long.
The rising rows mention “the next syllable” twice, and that is no slip. A Serbian rising accent is spread over two syllables: the stressed one starts the climb, and the peak of the melody lands on its unstressed neighbour. That is why, in vòda and rúka, an English ear may hear the second syllable as the stressed one. Do not follow it: the stress stays on the syllable with the mark, on vo and on ru; “vo-DA” is simply wrong. With the falling accents the peak and the drop fit inside the stressed syllable, and there is no such confusion.
The distribution rules: which accent can stand where
This is where the really useful part begins. Where each of the four accents may stand is strictly limited, and from those limits you can work out a lot without a dictionary. There are only three rules.
Put the first two rules together and you get the familiar ban: the stress never falls on the last syllable of a word of two or more syllables. A falling accent cannot go there because it stands only at the start; a rising accent cannot go there because it needs a syllable to its right to hand its peak to, and there is nothing to the right of the last syllable. It helps to count how many accents each syllable allows: in a longer word the first syllable allows all four, any middle syllable only two (both rising), the last one none; in a one-syllable word the single syllable allows two (both falling).
What this gives you: if you know that planìna is stressed on “ni”, the tone is already known: rising. One question is left, long or short. And in the one-syllable dȃn the tone is known in advance. All four options are open in exactly one place: the first syllable of a longer word.
A syllabic r can carry the stress too: it behaves like a full vowel and obeys the same rules. sȑce (heart), dȑvo (tree; wood), cȓkva (church): first syllable and a falling accent every time.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
The four accents
Accent = tone (falling / rising) × length (short / long). The mark sits over the stressed vowel.
Double grave or arc: the tone falls; single stroke: it rises. Leaning left (à, ȁ) short, leaning right (á) long.
Rising spans two syllables: the peak is on the next syllable, but the stress stays on the marked one (vòda, never “vo-DA”). Practise whole stretches.
Distribution
Falling (ȁ, ȃ): first syllable only.
Rising (à, á): any syllable except the last; never in a one-syllable word.
A stressed one-syllable word: falling. Stress off the first syllable: rising.
So a longer word’s last syllable is never stressed. Accents per syllable: 1st 4, middle 2, last 0.
Syllabic r carries the accent like a vowel: sȑce, dȑvo, cȓkva. Exceptions: some loanwords.
Post-tonic length (macron ā ē ī ō ū)
Only to the right of the stress; everything before it is short. One accent, maybe several lengths. A macron is not stress: dèvōjka, stress on de.