Croatian language: Encyclopedia II - Croatian language - Phonology

Croatian language - Phonology

Croatian language - Vowels

The Croatian vowel system is simple, with five long and five short vowels (all monophthongs), as well as the diphthong /ie/. Although meaningful, the difference between long and short vowels is not represented in Croatian orthography. The five vowel qualities are as follows. (A schwa /ə/ also occurs marginally.)

The syllabic trill can also be either long or short, and can carry the rising or falling pitch accent (see next).

Syllables before the pitch accent always have short vowels. Those after the pitch accent may have either long or short vowels.

Croatian language - Pitch accent

Croatian has a two-way pitch accent. When a syllable is stressed, it may have either a rising or a falling tone. Although the distinction is meaningful, it is not represented in Croatian orthography. In the descriptive literature, five diacritics are used that are specific to Croatian. They are:

Lexical words (such as nouns) of one syllable always have falling tone. Words with two or more syllables may also have a falling tone, but (with the exception of foreign borrowings and interjections) only on the first syllable. Words of more than one syllable may instead have a rising tone, on any syllable but the last.

Enclitics (little grammatical words which latch on to a preceding lexical word) never have tone. Proclitics (clitics which latch on to a following word), on the other had, may "steal" a falling tone (but not a rising tone or the vowel length) from the following word. The stolen accent may end up being either falling or rising on the proclitic:

Croatian language - Consonants

The consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants. As in English, voicedness is phonemic, but aspiration is not.

In consonant clusters all consonants are either voiced or voiceless. All the consonants are voiced (if the last consonant is normally voiced) or voiceless (if the last consonant is normally voiceless). This rule does not apply to approximants — a consonant cluster may contain voiced approximants and voiceless consonants; as well as to foreign words (Washington would be transcribed as VašinGton/ВашинГтон), personal names and when consonants are not inside of one syllable.

R can be syllabic, playing the role of a vowel in certain words (occasionally, it can even have a long accent). For example, the tongue-twister na vrh brda vrba mrda involves four words with syllabic r. A similar feature exists in Czech, Slovak,Macedonian and Serbian. Very rare, l can be syllabic (in the name for the river "Vltava", 'l' is syllabic) as well as lj, m, n and nj in jargon.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Phonology", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki