An Italian cellist’s journey into Serbian Language — Lesson 1

Introduction

I believe this is a quite unique thing: an Italian cellist learning the Serbian language and writing about it in English!

I will be following the book Grammatica Serba by Gordana Grubač Allocco, teacher of Serbian at the University in Torino, Italy. After several books tried in the past, this is, by far, the best and most comprehensive one. This blog series also serves the purpose of keeping me accountable and to keep track of my progress.

Every lesson will be split in micro-topics to keep this easy to follow for you and practical to write for me. Let’s get started.

Brief glimpse into the Serbian Alphabet

The Serbian language uses a custom variant of the Cyrillic alphabet, created around the X century. It has 30 letters and it doesn’t use double letters. Various sounds do not exist natively in Italian, such as the soft and hard C and G. The order of letters is also slightly different from what we are used to. Serbian uses a latinised version (latinica) as well; this can help us recognise the different letters and get started with it.

Starting with A & B, we continue with V, G, D, then we have Đ, a soft G, like in “gioia” (joy) in Italian. The vowel E is followed by Ž, whose sound doesn’t exist in Italian and can be compared to the French “jour” (giorno, day). Then comes the Z that sounds like the deaf S in “casa” (house). Good Italian dictionaries show such a letter with a small dot centred below it. We continue with I, J (pronounced like the i in ieri (yesterday) or the y in you), K, L. Next we have the Lj, which is a single letter in Serbian, and is equivalent to the “gl” phoneme in the Italian “figlio” (son). Fast-forward to M, N, then Nj like in “gnocchi”, O, P, R, S, T (no Q!) before coming to the hardest part of the alphabet.

A soft C, written Ć, said to be equivalent to the sound of “ciao”, is in reality a bit different as seldom an Italian would say “ciao” with such a fluid C. The Italian C is exactly in the middle of the two Serbian Cs: Ć and Č. U, F, H (aspirated like “hotel” in English), C (pronounces like the English “ts” or the Italian double z). The next two letters have no equivalent in Italian: Č, the hard C, and Dž, the hard G, which I’ve learned to reproduce by shaping my mouth and cheeks as if I had to send a kiss to make the letters resonate more (remember the scene of Sebastian the crab in The Little Mermaid? Yes, that one!). On the contrary, I try to obtain the soft C & G by creating a forced smile during sound production. These are all diction exaggerations, but they helped me a lot to find sounds that I had not natively learned how to produce. The last letter is Š, like in “scena” (scene).

The following table recaps the Serbian Alphabet with the equivalent in the Cyrillic alphabet finally shown and an Italian example. Remember that, in Serbia, the Latin and Cyrillic are considered equivalent, and the only thing you shouldn’t do is to mix them in the same sentence.

Cyrillic	Latin	Sound in Italian
А а	A	Aria
Б б	B	Bacio
В в	V	Vino
Г г	G	Gatto
Д д	D	Dormire
Ђ ђ	Đ	Gioia
Е е	E	Essere
Ж ж	Ž	— (FR: jour)
З з	Z	S in Casa
И и	I	Indice
Ј ј	J	Ieri
К к	K	C in Casa
Л л	L	Leone
Љ љ	Lj	GL in Orgoglio
М м	M	Macchina
Н н	N	No
Њ њ	Nj	Gnocchi
О о	O	Operazione
П п	P	Padre
Р р	R	Ravioli
С с	S	Sapore
Т т	T	Talento
Ћ ћ	Ć	C in Ciao
У у	Y	Udito
Ф ф	F	Figura
Х х	H	H in the EN: Hotel
Ц ц	C	Zz in Mazza
Ч ч	Č	—
Џ џ	Dž	—
Ш ш	Š	Scenografia

How to learn the letters’ order?

As a classical musician, I can only suggest something that worked for me:

1. Group the first five letters as if they were a group of four short notes in one beat, followed by a single note on the next beat: А-Б-В-Г | Д
2. Group the next 12 letters in four groups of three notes, each made up of two short and one long note: Ђ-Е-Ж | З-И-Ј | К-Л-Љ | М-Н-Њ
3. Group the next 5 letters as you did for the first 5: О-П-Р-С | Т
4. Gather the last 8 letters in two equal and regular groups of four notes: Ћ-У-Ф-Х | Ц-Ч-Џ-Ш.

The rhythm should look something like this:

Bottom Line

That’s it for today! Thank you for reading so far, I hope you liked it!

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See you (hopefully soon) for another lesson!