Serbo-Croatian phonology
The Eastern Herzegovinian Neo-Shtokavian dialect forms the basis for Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian (the four national standards).
However, in the standard language, vocalic /l/ appears only in loanwords, as in the name for the Czech river Vltava for instance, or debakl, bicikl.
[1] In most spoken Croatian idioms, as well as in some Bosnian, they are postalveolar (/ʃ, ʒ, t͡ʃ, d͡ʒ/) instead, and there could be a complete or partial merger between /tʂ, dʐ/ and palatal affricates /tɕ, dʑ/.
Alveolo-palatal fricatives [ɕ, ʑ] are marginal phonemes, usually realized as consonant clusters [sj, zj].
However, the emerging Montenegrin standard has proposed two additional letters, Latin ⟨Ś⟩, ⟨Ź⟩ and Cyrillic ⟨С́⟩, ⟨З́⟩, for the phonemic sequences /sj, zj/, which may be realized phonetically as [ɕ, ʑ].
The prescriptive grammar Barić et al. (1997) published by the foremost Croatian normative body—the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics, describes it as a diphthong,[14] but this norm has been heavily criticized by phoneticians as having no foundation in the spoken language, the alleged diphthong being called a "phantom phoneme".
[15] Thus the reflex of long jat, which is spelled as a trigraph ⟨ije⟩ in standard Croatian, Bosnian and Ijekavian Serbian, represents the sequence /jeː/.
New Shtokavian dialects (which form the basis of the standard languages) allow two tones on stressed syllables and have distinctive vowel length and so distinguish four combinations, called pitch accent: short falling (ȅ), short rising (è), long falling (ȇ), and long rising (é).
Research done by Pavle Ivić and Ilse Lehiste has shown that all stressed syllables of Serbo-Croatian words are basically spoken with a high tone and that native speakers rely on the phonetic tone of the first post-tonic syllable to judge the pitch accent of any given word.
Therefore, truly narrow phonetic transcriptions of lònac, lónca, lȏnci and lȍnācā are [ˈlónáts, ˈlóːntsá, ˈlóːntsì, ˈlónàˑtsàˑ] or the equivalent [ˈlo˥nats˥, ˈloːn˥tsa˥, ˈloːn˥tsi˩, ˈlo˥naˑ˩tsaˑ˩].
Ivić and Lehiste were not the first scholars to notice this; in fact, Leonhard Masing [et] made a very similar discovery decades earlier, but it was ignored due to his being a foreigner, and because it contradicted the Vukovian approach[clarification needed], which was then already well-ingrained.
The so-called "fleeting a" (Serbo-Croatian: nepóstojānō a), or "movable a", refers to the phenomenon of short /a/ making apparently random appearance and loss in certain inflected forms of nouns.
The "fleeting a" is most common in the following cases:[22] The reflex of the Slavic first palatalization was retained in Serbo-Croatian as an alternation of before /e/ in inflection, and before /j, i, e/ and some other segments in word formation.
The conditions are: Doublets exist with adjectives derived with suffix -in from trisyllabic proper names: The output of the second and the third Slavic palatalization is in the Serbo-Croatian grammar tradition known as "sibilantization" (sibilarizácija/сибилариза́ција).
However, there are numerous orthographic exceptions, i.e. even if voicing or devoicing does take place in speech, the orthography does not record it, usually to maintain the etymology clearer.
