Reading and building our first sentences

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.