Formal vs informal register

Lesson opening

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

Registers: from the street to the council office

Serbian can say the same thing at different heights. “I have no money” is Nemam love, and Nemam para, and Nemam novca, and Ne raspolažem novčanim sredstvima. English has the same ladder: “I’m skint”, “I’m out of cash”, “I have no money”, “I do not have the necessary funds at my disposal”. All four are correct; a phrase only goes wrong when it is in the wrong place. Misjudge the floor, and a foreigner sounds either like a walking rulebook or like one of the lads where distance is needed.

Five floors of one staircase

It helps to picture registers as floors of a building, from the matey at the bottom to the official at the top:

(Klopa is “grub”, tebra “bro”, mrak “awesome”; bre is a spoken intensifier, roughly “man”; podnosilac is “the applicant”, shodno “pursuant to”.) One thought on four floors:

Signpost words: one idea, three floors

The easiest way to spot a register is through vocabulary: many everyday ideas have a word for conversation, a neutral word and an official one. You have met some of the pairs in “Synonyms & antonyms” and “Layers of loanwords”.

The left-hand column is not always rude: komšija, doktor, kola and kirija are what everyone says; a contract simply swaps them for the word on the right. Lova, kinta, ćale and keva, though, are slang, for friends only.

The meaning is the same: you say the first sentence in a café and write the second to the bank. Swap them and you sound overfamiliar at the bank, or like a police report in the café.

Look-alike words can sit on a different floor from the English word you see in them. Kompjuter looks like plain English, yet beside računar it is the word of speech (see “Layers of loanwords”). Šef looks like the English “chef” but means “boss”, and it is neutral: it even appears in job titles (šef odseka “head of section”). And kancelarija is simply “office”: Radim u kancelariji. “I work in an office.”

Cheat sheet

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

Registers

Register follows the situation, not the topic: words, grammar, formulas. A wrong case marks a foreigner; a wrong register offends.

Five floors

Words by floor

Grammar: speech and writing

Officialese: three techniques

Letter and message