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The Serbo-Croatian Comparative
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
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Serbo-Croatian is an Indo-European language, and like many languages of that family possesses a complex system of nominal and verbal inflection. The forms of the standard language have been fairly well described, though not from the structural point of view, in a number of handbooks. As a source of forms I have used August Leskien's Serbokroatische Grammatik (Heidelberg, 1914); but I have checked all forms against the speech of at least one informant—my wife, a native speaker of the Serbian regional standard, born in Valjevo, long resident in Belgrade.
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- Copyright © 1959 by Linguistic Society of America
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1 Lexical stress occurs within the utterance subject to a number of rather intricate conditions. The phonemic nature of stress in Serbo-Croatian and the conditions of its occurrence are the object of a study by Carleton T. Hodge, Serbo-Croatian stress and pitch, General linguistics 3.43-54 (1958). I had no opportunity to see this before completing the present paper.
2 There are also adjectives that show an alternation of vowel length within the basic stem, e.g. masc. sg. nom. indefinite stàr, masc. sg. nom. definite stàarii ‘old’. Variations of stress or vowel length in the basic stem are not treated here, since, as will be seen below, the essential contrast is between relative freedom of occurrence of these features in the basic stem and limitations on their occurrence in the comparative stem.
3 The automatic morphophonemic alternations (alternations determined by the phonological structure of the language) which come into play in the formation of the comparative are not listed here. Thus, I do not list the automatic change of s to š before ń, l', č, ć, which occurs before substitutive softening in čìst ‘clean’ : čìšćii ‘cleaner’. Only nonautomatic alternations are listed here.
4 This paper describes a variety of the standard language of the type traditionally termed ekavski, in which the reflex of Common Slavic e falls together with that of Common Slavic ě, resulting in e or ee. In order to apply the statements made here to those varieties of the standard language traditionally termed ijekavski, in which the reflex of Common Slavic ě is je or ije, one additional morphophonemic statement is required, namely that the alternation je ~ ije is for morphophonemic purposes to be equated with alternation in vowel length. In addition, the automatic replacement of the nonoccurring sequences lj and nj by l‘ and ń would come into play. Thus, corresponding to ekavski lèep : lèpšii (see §3(3) below), we have ijekavski lìjep : l‘èpšii.
5 It is to be understood that, when a stem like nizk- occurs without separation of the final consonant cluster by the inserted vowel, there is assimilation of voicing (automatic in Serbo-Croatian). Thus, the fem. sg. nom. indefinite based on the stem nizk- is nìska.
6 The two examples given under §3(5) show no variation in stem-vowel length in their basic forms, so that there is always a contrast in vowel length between the basic and comparative forms.