Азбука и правила читања
Overview
Serbian is written in two parallel, fully official scripts: ћирилица (Cyrillic) and латиница (Latin). This platform authors and stores content in Cyrillic; switch to Latin at any time with the script toggle, and every Serbian word on the page re-renders instantly.
Serbian spelling follows one simple principle, associated with the 19th-century reformer Vuk Karadžić: „Пиши као што говориш, читај као што је написано“ - write as you speak, read as it is written. Every letter always stands for exactly one sound, with no exceptions, no silent letters, and no letter combinations that quietly change a sound the way English gh, ph or th do.
30 letters, 30 sounds
The Cyrillic alphabet has exactly 30 letters, each representing exactly one sound. Three - Љ, Њ and Џ - correspond to two-letter combinations in Latin script (Lj, Nj, Dž), but in Cyrillic each is a single, indivisible letter and sound; do not think of љ as л + ј.
The full correspondence is in the table below. Because reading is always literal, once you know these 30 letter–sound pairings you can read aloud any Serbian word you see, even one you have never met before - pronunciation is never memorised separately from spelling.
Letters and habits worth unlearning
Serbian has no ъ, ь, ы, э, ё, щ, я or ю - letters that exist in some other Cyrillic-using alphabets to show a /j/ glide before a vowel. Serbian simply writes a separate letter ј before the plain vowel instead: ја, је, јо, ју - so јеж (hedgehog) spells the glide with ј before е, and ја (I) does the same before а.
Serbian also has letters with no obvious counterpart in every other Cyrillic-using alphabet: ч and ћ are a hard/soft pair close to English ch in cheap, and џ and ђ are the equivalent hard/soft pair close to English j in jungle and jam - ђ and ћ themselves differ only in voicing, not hardness. It is easy to collapse ч and ћ, or џ and ђ, into one sound out of habit - they are genuinely different letters in Serbian and can change a word's meaning.
Finally, Serbian spelling never reduces unstressed vowels the way some languages do (an unstressed о sounding like а) - always write the vowel that belongs to the word, regardless of stress: говори (speaks), never говари.
Tables
| Letter | Example |
|---|---|
| А а | авион |
| Б б | брат |
| В в | вода |
| Г г | глава |
| Д д | дан |
| Ђ ђ | ђак |
| Е е | ево |
| Ж ж | жена |
| З з | зец |
| И и | име |
| Ј ј | јаје |
| К к | кућа |
| Л л | лав |
| Љ љ | љубав |
| М м | мама |
| Н н | ноћ |
| Њ њ | њива |
| О о | око |
| П п | пас |
| Р р | рука |
| С с | сунце |
| Т т | трава |
| Ћ ћ | ћилим |
| У у | уста |
| Ф ф | филм |
| Х х | хлеб |
| Ц ц | цвет |
| Ч ч | чај |
| Џ џ | џеп |
| Ш ш | шума |
Examples
Compared with…
English spelling is famously unpredictable - though, through, tough and cough are four different sounds for the same four letters. Serbian is the opposite extreme: completely phonetic, with a fixed one-to-one letter-to-sound mapping and no silent letters at all.
Common mistakes
Tips & exceptions
- When a foreign or borrowed word enters Serbian, it is spelled the way it sounds, never the way it looks in the source language - sound it out and spell what you hear.
- Read the alphabet table aloud a few times, then flip the script toggle at the top of the page to Latin and check yourself letter by letter.
- Practise telling ч apart from ћ, and џ apart from ђ, early - these are new sound distinctions for many learners and they change the meaning of real words.
- The digraph letters capitalise only their first component in a capitalised word (Љубав → Ljubav in Latin), but capitalise both letters in an all-caps word (ЉУБАВ → LJUBAV).
- Loanwords are adapted to Serbian spelling by sound, not copied letter-for-letter from the source language - English football becomes фудбал, spelled exactly as a Serbian speaker pronounces it.
Summary
Opens Focus mode: one exercise at a time, with explanations — either script accepted.
Grammar Words Guided lesson Guided lesson Guided lesson Guided lesson Listening Reading Test
This lesson is the unit's first step. The grammar, the words and the first guided lesson are open to everyone; the rest of the unit's lessons and its text, dialogue and tasks come with Premium.