Правописне норме
Overview
Everything so far has been about spoken and written grammar; правопис (orthography) is the separate layer of conventions governing how correctly-formed Serbian gets written down - capitalization, foreign-name spelling, punctuation marks, and numeral formatting. Getting the grammar right and the orthography wrong is exactly what marks a fluent-but-careless writer, the written-register counterpart to phraseology-collocations-c1's warning about correct words in the wrong pairing.
This lesson picks three well-attested, high-value areas rather than attempting the whole Правопис: capitalization in multi-word names, phonetic transcription of foreign words, and the hyphen/dash/ordinal-period distinctions. Ekavian/ijekavian spelling variation is deliberately out of scope here - it gets its own dedicated lesson next. Comma placement is also out of scope: unlike the hyphen/dash/ordinal-period rules above, it isn't a small, listable set of conventions but a whole semantic principle - слободна (логичка) интерпункција - covered in its own lesson, punctuation-comma-c1.
Capitalization in multi-word proper names
A multi-word proper name - an institution, a title, a holiday - capitalizes its first word only, unless another word inside it is independently a proper noun in its own right, as in Народна библиотека Србије (The National Library of Serbia) - see the table below for why each word there is or isn't capitalized.
Where no word besides the first is independently a proper noun, everything after it stays lowercase: Прва српска гимназија capitalizes only Прва. Holidays follow the identical rule: Нова година (New Year) capitalizes Нова as the first word and leaves година, an ordinary common noun, lowercase.
Phonetic transcription of foreign words and names
Serbian orthography is consistently phonetic: a foreign name is written the way it sounds, not the way it's spelled in its source language, in both scripts - Њујорк, not New York left in Latin letters inside Cyrillic text, and the same for personal names (table below). This holds even inside otherwise Cyrillic prose - a foreign name never simply switches the reader into a different alphabet mid-sentence.
Naturalized loanwords go further than transcription - they are fully adapted, ordinary Serbian words, inflected exactly like native vocabulary: компјутер (computer) takes cases and endings like any other masculine noun, with none of the special treatment a still-foreign proper name gets. A handful of very recent or highly technical loanwords remain unsettled and are still sometimes written in original Latin spelling pending full adaptation.
Hyphen, dash, and the ordinal-number period
Цртица (hyphen) sits tight against both neighbors with no spaces, joining a compound word: српско-руски, an adjective combining two nationalities. Црта (dash) has a space on each side when it sets off a parenthetical remark (example below); marking a genuine range or interval, it normally closes up with no spaces instead. The spacing, not the mark's length alone, is what a reader actually notices first.
A digit followed by a period marks an ordinal number; the same digit with no period is a plain cardinal count: 3. поглавље is "chapter three" (the third chapter), while 3 поглавља is "three chapters". The period is easy to drop in casual digital writing, but careful or formal writing keeps it, because dropping it genuinely changes the meaning rather than just the formality.
Tables
| Name | Why |
|---|---|
| Народна библиотека Србије | „Народна“ - прва реч; „Србије“ - сопствено име |
| Прва српска гимназија | само прва реч, нема уграђеног имена |
| Нова година | исто правило, важи и за празнике |
Examples
Compared with…
English capitalizes every content word in most multi-word proper names and titles ("The National Library of Serbia"), so an English speaker's instinct will consistently over-capitalize in Serbian - check every word individually against the first-word-plus-embedded-proper-noun rule rather than trusting the English pattern. English also freely keeps foreign names in their original spelling ("Wolfgang", "Zürich"), where Serbian always adapts them phonetically - one of the more persistent transfer errors at this level.
Common mistakes
Tips & exceptions
- For a multi-word proper name, capitalize only the first word - then check each remaining word individually: capitalize it only if it would be a proper noun on its own.
- Never leave a foreign name in Latin letters inside Cyrillic text - transcribe it phonetically the way it sounds in Serbian, the same principle alphabet-reading-rules-a1 introduced for reading foreign loanwords.
- When in doubt between hyphen and dash, check the spacing: цртица sits tight with no spaces inside a compound word; црта has a space on each side when it sets off a parenthetical, but closes up with no spaces when it marks a range.
- Виљем Шекспир, transcribed via the German form Wilhelm rather than English pronunciation, was the traditional 19th/20th-century rendering and still turns up in older editions and reprints - but it works against this very lesson's phonetic principle. Modern normative sources split on the replacement: Tvrtko Prćić's transcription dictionary prefers Вилијам Шекспир, taught here as the form far more common in actual usage, while Клајн's own Речник језичких недоумица separately prefers Вилијем Шекспир - two competing modern forms, both distinct from the outdated Виљем.
- A handful of well-established institutions and geographic multi-word names capitalize every content word by long-standing convention rather than the general rule - treat these as memorized exceptions, not a pattern to extend.
- Some very recent or highly technical loanwords are still written in their original Latin spelling even in Cyrillic text, pending full adaptation - a genuinely unsettled, actively shifting area of current usage, not a fixed rule.
- In casual digital writing, the ordinal period after a digit is very often dropped entirely - standard only in careful or formal writing, exactly as this lesson's other precision-register points have noted throughout.
Summary
Opens Focus mode: one exercise at a time, with explanations — either script accepted.
Grammar Words Guided lesson Guided lesson Guided lesson Guided lesson Guided lesson Guided lesson Guided lesson Listening Reading Writing Speaking Speaking 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.