Serbo-Croatian phonology

Serbo-Croatian is a South Slavic language with four national standards. The Eastern Herzegovinian Neo-Shtokavian dialect forms the basis for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian (the four national standards).

Consonants

The consonant system of Serbo-Croatian has 25 phonemes. One peculiarity is a presence of both post-alveolar and palatal affricates, but a lack of corresponding palatal fricatives. Unlike most other Slavic languages such as Russian, there is no palatalized versus non-palatalized (hard–soft) contrast for most consonants.

		Labial	Dental, Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar
Nasal		m	n		ɲ
Plosive	voiceless	p	t			k
	voiced	b	d			ɡ
Affricate	voiceless		t͡s	t͡ʂ	t͡ɕ
	voiced			d͡ʐ	d͡ʑ
Fricative	voiceless	f	s	ʂ		x
	voiced	v	z	ʐ
Approximant	central				j
	lateral		l		ʎ
Trill			r

Vowels

The Serbo-Croatian vowel system is symmetrically composed of five vowel qualities /a, e, i, o, u/. Although the difference between long and short vowels is phonemic, it is not represented in standard orthography, as it is in Czech or Slovak orthography, except in dictionaries. Unstressed vowels are shorter than the stressed ones by 30% (in the case of short vowels) and 50% (in the case of long vowels).

	Front		Central		Back
	short	long	short	long	short	long
Close	i	iː			u	uː
Mid	e	eː			o	oː
Open			a	aː

External links

• Serbo-Croatian phonology