The orthographic norm

Lesson opening

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

The norm and the Pravopis: who decides what is correct

You have learned dozens of rules by now: where an abbreviation takes a dot, where a comma goes in a complex sentence, why ne znam is two words and nemam is one. What remains is the big question: where do these rules come from, and what do you do when you cannot remember a rule and have to write something right now, an application, a contract, an invoice? The Serbian norm has an address, a book and a table of contents. This lesson teaches you to use them, and it covers the three places where a mistake shows at once: dates, numbers and abbreviations.

Matica srpska’s Pravopis: the book people consult

The current rulebook of Serbian spelling is the Pravopis srpskoga jezika (“Orthography of the Serbian Language”), published by Matica srpska, the oldest Serbian cultural and learned society, in Novi Sad. It is one book in two parts. The first is rules by topic: capital letters, writing words together or apart, punctuation and the other written signs (the dot in numbers and dates among them), hyphenation at line ends, foreign names, abbreviations, both scripts. The second is the orthographic dictionary (pravopisni rečnik): an alphabetical list of the words people stumble over, each with its correct spelling and labels.

Hence the key skill: you do not read the norm, you look things up in it word by word. You cannot remember whether ne bih is written together? Look up bih. Not sure whether it is Njujork or “Nju Jork”? Look up the word, not the chapter on transcription. The exceptions from the lesson “Cluster changes” are checked the same way: predsednik with its d, studentkinja with its t. The rule is for when the word is missing.

An important consequence: the norm changes from edition to edition, so in an argument you name the book and the year: “according to the 2010 Pravopis it is written this way”, not “this looks more correct to me”. And print is not yet the norm: the lesson “Together vs apart” showed auto-put “motorway”, which the Pravopis writes with a hyphen, although road signs and newspapers often have “autoput”.

Three shelves: orthography, dictionary, grammar

Each kind of question has its own address. The beginner’s mistake is to look for the meaning of a word in the orthography manual, or for an explanation of a case in the dictionary. Sort your doubts onto three shelves and the answer takes a minute.

The linguist Ivan Klajn’s Rečnik jezičkih nedoumica (“Dictionary of Linguistic Doubts”) is the one to buy first: a small handbook in which the disputed pairs stand in alphabetical order, each with short advice on which form to choose. For a foreigner it is more useful than the thick Pravopis, because it lists exactly the places where native speakers go wrong too. The grammar of Stanojčić and Popović, two Serbian linguists, is the one schools teach from.

Doublets: when the norm allows both

A norm need not mean “one correct variant, all else wrong”. The Serbian one has doublets (dubleti), pairs in which both members are standard. English speakers know the situation from British and American spelling, colour and color, organise and organize. In Serbian this is not looseness: partly it is a consequence of history, since the Serbian norm described two pronunciations and two scripts from the start.

Cheat sheet

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

The norm and the Pravopis

The code of writing is Matica srpska’s Pravopis srpskoga jezika: rules by topic + an orthographic dictionary. Editions: 1960 (shared with the Croats), 1993 (Pešikan, Jerković, Pižurica), 2010 (current). Name the edition in an argument. Print is not the norm: the Pravopis has auto-put, signs often “autoput”.

Which book for which question

Look up the word, not the rule. Signs, ads and news tickers do not set the norm.

Doublets: both variants correct

• script: Beograd and Београд; pronunciation: hleb — hljeb, mleko — mlijeko
• vocabulary: Uskrs — Vaskrs (Easter); 20 odsto — 20 posto — 20 procenata (20 per cent); terms: zarez — zapeta (comma)
• date: 5. maj 2026., 5. 5. 2026., 5. V 2026.

But within one text, consistency: one script, one date format, one way of writing numbers.

Date and time

Day first; month in lower case. The dot after the day and the year = the sign of an ordinal (like English -th); before a comma, bracket or dash it goes: 5. maja 2026, a… A span: od 1. do 5. juna; school year 2025/26. godina; godine after the year is optional.

Numbers

• thousands with a dot or a space, 12.500, 12 500; four digits also bare, 1000; 1.500 = hiljadu petsto
• a comma for decimals, 3,14 (tri zapeta četrnaest); per cent 20% or 20 %
• no separator: 1999. godine, str. 1200, broj 1050
• ordinal: 5. sprat, 21. vek, XXI vek; in a document the sum in words too: 12.500,00 dinara (slovima: dvanaest hiljada petsto dinara)
• editors start no sentence with a figure: Dvadeset ljudi je došlo.

Abbreviations by the norm

• dr, mr, gđa with no dot; tj. (i.e.), itd. (etc.), npr. (e.g.): one word, one dot
• first mention in full, then abbreviated: Agencija za privredne registre (APR) → APR
• do not invent your own; references: v. see, up. compare (cf.), isp. compare with, nav. delo op. cit., ur. editor, prev. translation
• unit symbols are international, no dot: kg, km, l, h