Write as you speak: the reform that made Serbian spelling honest
One man spent forty years arguing that a written language should record the one people actually speak. He lost most of those arguments while he was alive - and then Serbian became one of the easiest languages in Europe to read out loud.
If you have started learning Serbian, you have probably already noticed something strange: you can read a word you have never seen before, out loud, correctly, on the first attempt. Not approximately - correctly. This is so unusual that it is worth asking how it happened, because it did not happen by accident and it very nearly did not happen at all.
The language nobody spoke
At the start of the nineteenth century, educated Serbs wrote in something called Slavonic-Serbian: a mixture of Church Slavonic, Russian and the spoken vernacular, in proportions that each author chose for themselves. It had letters for sounds that had disappeared centuries earlier and no letters for several sounds people used every day. Reading it aloud correctly was a skill you acquired at school, over years, the way an English speaker acquires the spelling of «through», «though» and «thought».
The gap between the written and the spoken language was not seen as a problem. It was seen as the point. A literary language was supposed to be elevated, learned and a little difficult; the language of the market and the village was, by definition, not literature.
A self-taught collector of folk songs
Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864) was not a professor. He had almost no formal education, walked with a crutch after a childhood illness, and made his name collecting the songs and stories that villagers sang and told. That work gave him an argument nobody else in the debate had: he had written down, phrase by phrase, an enormous quantity of the actual spoken language, and he could see that it was neither poor nor crude. It was a complete language with its own grammar, and it already had a literature - an oral one.
From that came a proposal that sounds obvious now and sounded outrageous then: throw out the written language and standardise the spoken one. And once you have decided to write down speech, the spelling rule follows by itself.
Piši kao što govoriš, čitaj kao što je napisano
Write as you speak, read as it is written
The principle is usually credited to Vuk, though the formulation itself comes from the German philologist Johann Christoph Adelung, whose work Vuk knew. What Vuk did was apply it to an entire national language without compromise.
Six letters and one scandal
One sound per letter, one letter per sound. To make that true, Vuk had to remove the letters that no longer corresponded to anything and add letters for the sounds that had none. Six letters entered the alphabet in the form we use today. Try reading the example words out loud - each one is pronounced exactly as it is spelled.
| Letter | A word that uses it |
|---|---|
| j | juče |
| lj | ljubav |
| nj | knjiga |
| ć | noć |
| đ | đak |
| dž | džep |
Two of them were assembled out of older material: љ and њ are the old ligatures of л and н with a soft sign. Two had lived in Serbian manuscripts for centuries without official standing: ћ and џ. One, ђ, was essentially new. And one was a scandal.
The letter ј was taken from the Latin alphabet. To Vuk it was the obvious solution: the sound existed, the Latin alphabet had a clean sign for it, and inventing a new shape would have been vanity. To his opponents it was a Catholic letter smuggled into an Orthodox alphabet, and they said so, loudly, for decades. More ink was spilled over this single letter than over the entire rest of the reform.
Spelling that follows the mouth
The rule went further than the alphabet. In most languages, when two consonants meet and one changes the other, the writing pretends it did not happen - the spelling keeps the shape of the parts. Serbian writes down what the mouth actually does. This is the part Russian speakers usually find hardest to believe.
beg + stvo → bekstvo
escape, flight
The voiced г meets the voiceless с, devoices to к - and the spelling changes with it. Russian writes «бегство» and lets the reader work it out.
Srbin + ski → srpski
Serbian (adjective)
Same rule, opposite direction of surprise for a Russian eye: б becomes п because that is what you say.
svat + ba → svadba
wedding
And it works the other way too: a voiceless т before the voiced б becomes д on the page.
He did not live to see it
The reform was fought at every step. Vuk's spelling was banned from official use in Serbia for most of his working life; the church opposed him, the literary establishment mocked him, and censors blocked his books. He died in Vienna in 1864. His orthography became the official standard of Serbia in 1868 - four years too late for him to be told about it.
This is why the first week of Serbian is unusually cheap. In most languages you spend it learning that spelling and pronunciation are two separate systems. Here you learn thirty letters, and from that moment every new word you meet in writing is a word you can already say. Spend the time you saved on the cases instead - that is where Serbian charges you.
There is one loose end, and it is a big one. Vuk's principle says: write as you speak. But Serbs in different regions did not, and do not, speak the same way - the word for «milk» is млеко in Belgrade and мљеко further west. A rule that follows speech has to decide whose speech, and that question turned out to be far harder than any letter.