How to pronounce Serbian vowels so everyone can understand you

PRONUNCIATION

How to pronounce Serbian vowels so everyone can understand you

By Danica Gómez Marković

When it comes to Serbian pronunciation everyone focuses on consonants, but vowels are equally as important. You should first learn to pronounce the Serbian vowels correctly and then focus on the consonants.

You think Serbian vowels are easy to pronounce? Let’s give it a go.

An underlying problem

Most people learn Serbian through English. This means most beginner lessons are in English. Overall this is not an ideal situation. The best thing would be to learn with someone who knows your mother tongue, can compare it to Serbian, and understand the difficulties you have.

As per pronunciation of vowels, if your first language is Italian or Spanish, Serbian vowels are a piece of cake for you. But if you strongly rely on English to learn Serbian, it could be a problem.

I’ve seen it, I’ve heard it. You also have this problem if you’re reading Serbian words that are similar to English as you would read them in English. Check this out:

(SRB) ideja /iděːja/

(ENG) idea /aɪˈdɪə/

(SRB) problem /prǒbleːm/

(ENG) problem /ˈprɒbləm/

Four types of accents in Serbian

Before we dive deeper into the vowels, we need to talk about the accent. As carriers of stress in a word, it is essential to pronounce vowels correctly. In the Serbian language, accent usually isn’t marked, so the only way to know how to pronounce the word is to first hear it.

Syllables are an important player here. A word can be divided into smaller units called syllables. Like this: fan-tas-tic. The word ‘fantastic’ has 3 syllables (fan-tas-tic). Let’s see an example with a Serbian word:

raz-mi-sli-ti

the word we will use further below lekar, which only has two syllables –

le-kar.

Pronunciation hack Pronouncing words, even difficult ones, can be easier if you divide them into syllables and pronounce them syllable per syllable until it gets easier.

What accents are there in the Serbian language? A word can be stressed in 4 ways:

longrising ′
shortrising ‵
longfalling ⁀
shortfalling ‶

While many speakers hear the difference between long and short accents, they don’t hear it between falling and rising accents.

General Guidelines about Word Stress in Serbian

Officially the last syllable can never be stressed unless it’s a one-syllable word. Meaning that, for example, you can’t pronounce the word ‘lekar’ as 🔉leKAR but 🔉LEkar. In reality in many dialects across Serbia speakers stress the last syllable.

However, in regions where this is not the case, stressing the last syllable can be seen as a sign of a rural accent. Stressing the last syllable usually doesn’t provoke misunderstandings between speakers.

Even the non-stressed syllables can be long or short. If they are long, you’ll probably think the word has two accents, like in 🔉DEvojka. The underlined syllable is not stressed but it’s long.

Even though a vowel is always the one to carry the accent in a stressed syllable, you know some Serbian words have no vowels. These are usually one-syllable words and carry an /r/ sound, which is stressed. ‘R’ is considered a semivowel in this case: crn, vrh, prst.

Serbian vowels

Quick rules to remember about Serbian vowels:

There are only 5 of them.
Vowels are pronounced without obstacles. The air you exhale while pronouncing vowels is not hit by your teeth, tongue, or lips.
They are always pronounced.
You always use your vocal cords to pronounce them.
They are always pronounced the same way.
They can be long and short. In phonetics, a long vowel is marked by: as in the word ‘ideja’ /iděːja/.
Two successive vowels in the same word always belong to different syllables. You never combine them. What do I mean?

🔉avion -> a-vi-on

🔉vakuum -> va-ku-um

🔉aerodrom -> a-e-ro-drom

Let’s check each vowel and get you ready to practice.