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Serbo-Croatian phonology

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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.

  • is labiodental before , as in tramvaj , whereas is velar before , as in stanka .
  • are dental, whereas are alveolar. become laminal denti-alveolar , before dental consonants.
  • is palato-alveolar .
  • is a phonetic fricative, although it has less frication than . However, it does not interact with unvoiced consonants in clusters as a fricative would, and so is considered to be phonologically a sonorant (approximant).
  • are voiced before voiced consonants.
  • Glottal stop may be inserted between vowels across word boundary, as in i onda .
  • Croatian has more allophones:
    • are retracted to before .
    • is retracted to when it is initial in a consonant cluster, as in hmelj .

can be syllabic, short or long, and carry rising or falling tone, e.g. kȓv ('blood'), sȑce ('heart'), sŕna ('deer'), mȉlosr̄đe ('compassion'). It is typically realized by inserting a preceding or succeeding non-phonemic vocalic glide.

is generally velarized or "dark" . Diachronically, it was fully vocalized into in coda positions, as in past participle *radil > radio ('worked'). In some dialects, notably Torlakian and Kajkavian, that process did not take place, and can be syllabic as well. However, in the standard language, vocalic appears only in loanwords, as in the name for the Czech river Vltava for instance, or debakl, bicikl. Very rarely other sonorants are syllabic, such as in the surname Štarklj and in njutn ('newton').

The retroflex consonants are, in more detailed phonetic studies, described as apical . In most spoken Croatian idioms, as well as in some Bosnian, they are postalveolar () instead, and there could be a complete or partial merger between and palatal affricates . where most Croatian and some Bosnian speakers merge the pairs č, ć and dž, đ , into and .

Alveolo-palatal fricatives are marginal phonemes, usually realized as consonant clusters . However, the emerging Montenegrin standard has proposed two additional letters, Latin ⟨Ś⟩, ⟨Ź⟩ and Cyrillic ⟨С́⟩, ⟨З́⟩, for the phonemic sequences , which may be realized phonetically as . Voicing contrasts are neutralized in consonant clusters, so that all obstruents are either voiced or voiceless depending on the voicing of the final consonant, though this process of voicing assimilation may be blocked by syllable boundaries.

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