New words and one-off coinages
Lesson opening
This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
New words and one-off coinages: where they come from and which ones stay
Every year new words appear in Serbian. Some will be in the dictionary ten years from now, some will last one news cycle, and some will never leave the headline that coined them. Learning them from a list is pointless: any list of fresh words ages faster than it can be printed.
What does not change is the machinery: a new word is made with the same tools as an old one, only faster. So the lesson has two jobs. The first is to understand a new word from its parts and from where it came. The second is to assess it: standard, colloquial, jargon or a one-off, and where you can use it. The second matters more: misread a word and you get a misunderstanding; misjudge it and you give an impression of yourself.
Five routes to a new word
Almost any new word fits one row of this table; each row is taken in turn below.
A sixth route creates no new word at all: an old word shifts its meaning, as miš, korpa, priča, oblak (“mouse, basket, story, cloud”) have done. When the new meaning is copied from English, as with miš and oblak, it is the translation by meaning from the third row. For the reader the effect is the same: a familiar word suddenly means something else (the lesson “Words with many meanings”).
Borrowing: three steps
A foreign word enters Serbian in three steps; how many it has taken shows how well it has settled.
Step one: sound and spelling. Serbian writes a loan the way it hears it: strimovanje, podkast, influenser, kriptovaluta (the lesson “International and English words”). As long as a word keeps its English spelling, it is still a guest.
Step two: grammar. The word gets a gender from its ending and a full set of case endings: a final consonant makes it masculine, -a makes it feminine, and from then on it behaves like a native word (podkast, podkasta, podkastu, podkastom, podkasti; aplikacija, aplikacije, aplikaciju); see the lesson “Declension of loanwords”.
Step three, the decisive one: a family of its own. A settled word starts to give birth to others with Serbian suffixes (the first route in the table), and its family is what tells a full resident from a lodger.
Serbian processes the new with a handful of suffixes and prefixes. Learn them and you will understand words that do not exist yet.
An English verb cannot come in bare: Serbian needs a suffix to conjugate it, and it is almost always -ovati: “to like” is lajkovati — lajkujem, “to share” šerovati — šerujem, “to scroll” skrolovati — skrolujem. The odd one out is guglati — guglam “to google”, which made do with plain -ati (the lesson “Verb-forming suffixes”).
Translated piece by piece: a native word on a foreign blueprint
The third route works quietly: the word looks Serbian, but the design is foreign. A foreign word is translated piece by piece, and the result looks home-grown; linguists call such a translation a calque. For an English speaker this is the friendliest route: read the parts and the English shows through.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
New words and one-off coinages in brief
A new word has entered the language (outlives its occasion, has relatives). A one-off is made for one occasion. A word on a common pattern is clear before anyone has said it (podkast → podkaster).
| Route | Examples |
|---|---|
| a native suffix on any root | lajk → lajkovati, hejt → hejter, digitalan → digitalizacija |
| borrowing | influenser, podkast, striming, kripto |
| translation piece by piece | društvene mreže, pametni telefon, veštačka inteligencija, neboder |
| translation by meaning | miš, prozor, oblak, pratilac, preuzeti, podeliti |
| two words into one | mobilni telefon → mobilni; sapunska opera → sapunica |
| clipping and blending | fakultet → faks; banka + automat → bankomat |
| a new meaning for an old word | miš, korpa, priča, oblak |
Three steps: spelt as heard → gender and cases (podkast, podkasta, podkastu) → a family (lajk, lajkovi, lajkovati, lajkujem, lajkovanje).
Suffixes: verb -ovati, -isati, -irati (lajkovati — lajkujem, šerovati, ažurirati; but guglati — guglam); person -er, -aš, -džija (jutjuber, tviteraš), feminine -ka, -ica (influenserka); process -izacija, -izovati (digitalizacija); action -nje, -ovanje (lajkovanje, strimovanje); first part e-, veb- (eUprava, veb-sajt).
| Compression | Full phrase → one word |
|---|---|
| the noun drops (adjective endings stay) | lična karta → lična; vozačka dozvola → vozačka; hitna pomoć → hitna; mobilni telefon → mobilni; mineralna voda → mineralna |
| suffix -ica, -ac, -aš | sapunska opera → sapunica; specijalna jedinica → specijalac; prva liga → prvoligaš; osnovna škola → osnovac |
| in full in documents: legal terms | vanredno stanje, javna nabavka, matični broj |
| clipping; letters as a word | faks, komp, profa, fotka; esemes, pi-ar |
| blend | bankomat, motel, smog, podkast, emotikon; sarmagedon |
Five tests: 1) who else says it? 2) outlived its occasion? 3) relatives? 4) endings? 5) a competitor? (folover — pratilac, daunlodovati — preuzeti, brauzer — pregledač).
| Verdict | Where |
|---|---|
| the norm (dictionary, official texts) | everywhere, documents too |
| colloquial norm (endings, a family) | speech, media, informal writing |
| jargon (one group) | inside that group |
| a one-off (one occasion, no family) | understand; quote only |
The norm does not rule on whether a word exists: spelling, Pravopis (2010); meaning, Rečnik srpskoga jezika (2007); recommendation, Odbor za standardizaciju. Not in the dictionary = “not for a document yet”, not “wrong”. Native words on buttons and in documents (računar, štampač, datoteka, lozinka); in speech an anglicism or a native colloquial word (kompjuter, printer, fajl; šifra, skinuti).
Fastest change: online (strimovanje, hešteg, kripto), work (frilenser, startap), crises (korona, kovid), media (tabloidizacija, tajkun), youth (krindž, random, ful). Lists date; mechanisms do not.