# All Slavic languages: ć or č?



## arwyn

Inspired by the discussion on the expression "svaka cast", I would like to know if there are any rules concerning the usage of ć or č? 

I always find it very confusing to decide which one is right. However, in most cases my decision turned out to be right, but as it is - shame on me - the result of guessing right, I would appreciate any useful information on this topic.

This is - by the way - always a nightmare for the diaspora.


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## pikabu

well, for (nice) start, there is not ć in slovene


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## Christo Tamarin

We may refer to the sound *č*, in Cyrillic *ч*, as the old *č. *In proto-Slavic, the consonant *к* changed to *č *before a front vowel. So, it is *č*/*ч *all over Slavic. Thus, for *čast* in Serbo-Croatian, we have *чест* in Bulgarian, *čеst* in Chech, *cześć* in Polish.

We may refer to the sound *ć*, in Serbian Cyrillic *ћ*, as the new *ć. *In proto-Slavic, there was -tj- or -kt- at that place. Moreover, we can see now *щ* in Bulgarian or *c* in Check/Slovac/Polish at its place. Example, for *noć* in Serbo-Croatian, we have *нощ* in Bulgarian and *noc* in Chech and Polish.

Note: In Russian, those two sounds are not distinguished: they are simply *ч*, which is always soft in Russian. In Serbo-Croatian, *ć*/*ћ *is soft and *č*/*ч* is hard.


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## Christo Tamarin

pikabu said:


> well, for (nice) start, there is not ć in slovene


If so, then Slovene is similar to Russian, having this topic in mind.


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## musicalchef

Has anyone come across any audio files online where they pronounce the difference VERY CLEARLY?  Most of the sites I've been on, they do it too quickly and I can't really hear the difference.


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## arwyn

pikabu said:


> well, for (nice) start, there is not ć in slovene



yeah, nice reason for learning the language.


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## arwyn

Christo Tamarin said:


> Note: In Russian, those two sounds are not distinguished: they are simply *ч*, which is always soft in Russian. In Serbo-Croatian, *ć*/*ћ *is soft and *č*/*ч* is hard.



But you can't always hear the difference which is a problem. 

I have looked up words with *ć *in my Croatian dictionary and at least the danger of misspelling a word (beginning with ć or č) is not high, because there are not many words that begin with a ć.


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## Athaulf

arwyn said:


> But you can't always hear the difference which is a problem.



This is indeed a huge problem for people in many regions of Croatia. If your native local pronunciation doesn't differentiate between _ć_ and _č_, and if you don't learn the difference by the time when your ears lose the ability to assimilate it naturally (which usually means the ages of 11-12), you're stuck. You'll have to either painstakingly learn the proper spelling word by word or live with the fact that you'll be making mistakes all the time. It's not something too terribly shameful -- huge numbers of Croats born and raised in Croatia, including many highly educated people, keep making mistakes with these two letters because they are totally deaf for the difference between them.



> This is - by the way - always a nightmare for the diaspora.


Not necessarily.  It depends on the dialect of your parents that you pick at home. I know Croats born here in Canada who constantly make mistakes with cases, verbal aspects, word order, etc., and are clueless about elementary spelling issues, but for all their other problems, they don't mix up _ć_ and _č. _

Now as for your main question, unfortunately, there are no general rules that could help you guess which letter to use. There are various special cases where the situation is pretty clear. For example, infinitives of verbs can end in _-ći_ but never in _-či_, and  diminutives of masculine nouns usually end in _-ić_, but never in _-i__č_. However, such cases cover only a minority of words.


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## kusurija

pikabu said:


> well, for (nice) start, there is not ć in slovene


There is no ć in Czech, too. Only č.


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## Tolovaj_Mataj

Christo Tamarin said:


> Note: In Russian, those two sounds are not distinguished: they are simply *ч*, which is always soft in Russian.


 


Christo Tamarin said:


> If so, then Slovene is similar to Russian, having this topic in mind.


 
Well, there's one significant difference between Slovene and Russian: č is always pronounced hard.

I'm able (or at least I think) to hear a difference between ć and č in Croatian/Serbian and I can even pronounce ć when it's isolated or I take time to prepare myself for it. In fast speech that wouldn't be possible I'm afraid. I have the same problems with a Spanish c/z sound. 
I was probably too old when I learnt it or I didn't hear it frequently enough.


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## behemot

kusurija said:


> There is no ć in Czech, too. Only č.



And in Polish we have only ć


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## cajzl

I think Polish has *č* (hard, written *cz*) and *ć* (soft, written *ć* or *ci* before vowel).

The Polish *cz *always corresponds to the Czech *č* and the Polish *ć* always corresponds to the Czech *ť* (palatal *t*, written *ť* or *ti *or *tě*) or *t* (where the palatalization is lost).

czarwony = červený
cichy = tichý
być = být, býti
cześć = čest

So we have no problem with Polish orthography in this particular case. But we have problem to pronounce *ć* and the Poles have some problem to pronounce *ť*.

For example:

the Czech word *prostě* - Poles pronounce [pro*ść*e]
the Polish word *proście* - Czechs pronounce usually [pro*šč*e] like *proszcze*


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## vatreno

arwyn said:


> ć or č?
> 
> It is "Svaka čast" said definetly said with a hard c, like ch in chalk. However my book describes it as tch and soft c being just ch. The two are definetly hard to tell the difference apart but the native speakers will correct you if you make any mistakes .
> 
> In case you were not able to tell from the context, arwyn, svaka cast has a couple meanings in English but it is always a compliment used like good job or every honor is deserved.
> 
> Interesting... cevapcici (usually just spelled cevapi) has both hard and soft c's in it.


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## natasha2000

vatreno said:


> arwyn said:
> 
> 
> 
> ć or č?
> Interesting... cevapcici (usually just spelled cevapi) has both hard and soft c's in it.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> It's *ćevapčići*.
> 
> 
> 
> arwyn said:
> 
> 
> 
> Inspired by the discussion on the expression "svaka cast", I would like to know if there are any rules concerning the usage of ć or č?
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> Unfortunately there is NO rule for č and ć. It is the same as if you were asking the rule for when to put l and when to put lj, n or nj, s/š or z/ž, or maybe dž/đ (this is another pair which is problematic for many native speakers from Bosnia and Croatia).
> 
> In Serbia people usually do not have any problem in differentiating those two sounds. This problem is, as I may observe, more connected to Bosnia and Croatia, excluding the Republika Srpska and Srpska Krajina.
Click to expand...


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## Athaulf

natasha2000 said:


> In Serbia people usually do not have any problem in differentiating those two sounds. This problem is, as I may observe, more connected to Bosnia and Croatia, excluding the Republika Srpska and Srpska Krajina.



I'm not sure which places you have in mind when you write "Srpska Krajina" -- the political entity that existed under that name in the first half of the 1990s encompassed a wide range of local dialects with different phonological status of   /tʃ/ and /ʨ/, which is true even if you don't count its disjoint part in the East. In fact, it even encompassed some Kajkavian areas that stretch south of the Kupa river, and  I would bet that many people from there would have lots of trouble with _č_ and _ć_. In any case, it's pointless to use the borders of the short-lived Republic of Serbian Krajina or the present-day Republic of Srpska in any linguistic context, since they were the result of a chaotic armed conflict and shady deals between politicians and don't correspond to any natural dialectal boundaries. In fact, this is true even for the borders between the former Yugoslav republics that are now independent states, and indeed, even for many other borders between Slavic-speaking nations. 

In Croatia, the main source of the problem is that Croatian Kajkavian dialects completely lack the phoneme /ʨ/ (the one that's spelled _ć_), much like the Slovenian language. In the last 150 or so years, since the modern standard Croatian/Serbian language was devised, Kajkavian has been relegated to the status of an unofficial dialect, while educated people have been expected to master the Shtokavian-based standard language. However, in the areas of Croatia with the Kajkavian substratum, even educated speakers -- who would normally use standard Croatian with only a mild  Kajkavian influence in everyday speech -- have for the most part never mastered the difference between the phonemens  /tʃ/ and /ʨ/. 

Since the Kajkavian-influenced areas cover the richest and most densely populated parts of Croatia nowadays, including Zagreb and  the surrounding area, the problem is in fact getting worse with time. Even the kids whose parents moved to Zagreb from elsewhere tend to pick up the local Kajkavian-influenced pronunciation without the /ʨ/ phoneme. Furthermore, in recent years, the Zagreb pronunciation has been rapidly becoming the new _de facto_ standard for good Croatian, even though it's quite different from the old Serbo-Croatian standard that is still formally official (a few months ago, we discussed this issue in the context of accentuation). As the Croatian linguist Ivo Škarić put it once, "In 150 years of such schooling [based on the Serbo-Croatian standard], Kajkavians were suposed to learn the difference between _č_ and _ć_. However, instead of that, everyone else started mixing them up."

In Bosnia, the situation is much less clear, and in my experience, varies much more between small local dialectal areas. Some people from Bosnia (like myself) hear a crystal-clear difference between _č_ and _ć_, as clear as between any other two phonemes, but others are almost as confused about it as Kajkavians from Croatia. Surprisingly, there are such differences even between people coming from areas that are very close to each other and whose dialects are otherwise extremely similar.


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## natasha2000

Athaulf said:


> I'm not sure which places you have in mind when you write "Srpska Krajina" -- the political entity that existed under that name in the first half of the 1990s encompassed a wide range of local dialects with different phonological status of   /tʃ/ and /ʨ/, which is true even if you don't count its disjoint part in the East. In fact, it even encompassed some Kajkavian areas that stretch south of the Kupa river, and  I would bet that many people from there would have lots of trouble with _č_ and _ć_. In any case, it's pointless to use the borders of the short-lived Republic of Serbian Krajina or the present-day Republic of Srpska in any linguistic context, since they were the result of a chaotic armed conflict and shady deals between politicians and don't correspond to any natural dialectal boundaries. In fact, this is true even for the borders between the former Yugoslav republics that are now independent states, and indeed, even for many other borders between Slavic-speaking nations.



Hm, I see that unintentionaly I made some wounds bleed here because of my lazyness to write more words, so I apologize if it is like that. 

I'll explain myself.

I wanted to say -- Serbs -- Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. Knin in Croatia, for example, and Banja Luka in Republika Srpska. I just repeat what people who live(d) there told me. 

As a matter of fact, I thought that ALL people living in Bosnia and Croatia (respectively, and no matter the nationality) speak in the same way, more or less, and that one of main characteristics of their speech was difficulty in distingishing ć/č and in less measure đ/dž.  As a matter of fact, my Granny came from Sarajevo, she was a Croat, and all members of her family couldn't distinguish ć/č and đ/dž.

Then I met some Serbians who came from Croatia (Knin, Vukovar) and Bosnia (Banja Luka), and I was surprised to discover that they really do not have that problem. Talking with other Serbs from those countries, I realized that I was wrong and that even though once upon a time all three nationalities lived together and mixed, they did have differencies in their speeches, and one of those was that Serbs don't have that problem which is placed as a subject of this thread. 

There. I hope I did explain myself. I had no intention to put any politics in this thread, and if I did, it was unintentioned.


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## Athaulf

natasha2000 said:


> Hm, I see that unintentionaly I made some wounds bleed here because of my lazyness to write more words, so I apologize if it is like that.



No need to apologize.  I just wanted to point out that when discussing South Slavic dialects, the borders of political entities and even many informal traditional regions often correlate very poorly with dialectal boundaries (which are often very fuzzy anyway). 



> I wanted to say -- Serbs -- Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. Knin in Croatia, for example, and Banja Luka in Republika Srpska. I just repeat what people who live(d) there told me.


But in Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia, ethnic Serbs (or Croats, etc.) do not speak differently from their neighbors of other South Slavic ethnicities who were born and raised at the same place. With a very few exceptions, in these countries people's language depends only on the region where they grew up, and not at all on ethnicity.   A Serb and a Croat who grew up in the same village or town will end up speaking exactly the same dialect. I myself grew up in Banja Luka, and my speech as a kid was absolutely indistinguishable from my Serbian peers*. Thus, there is no point in including ethnicity in these discussions at all.

* - I suppose if we're really going to split hairs, there were differences across ethnicities in a small subset of religion-related vocabulary, since people of different faiths would pick up those words in different places of worship. However, these differences are not only minuscule, but also unrelated to the thread topic. 



> As a matter of fact, I thought that ALL people living in Bosnia and Croatia (respectively, and no matter the nationality) speak in the same way, more or less, and that one of main characteristics of their speech was difficulty in distingishing ć/č and in less measure đ/dž.  As a matter of fact, my Granny came from Sarajevo, she was a Croat, and all members of her family couldn't distinguish ć/č and đ/dž.
> 
> Then I met some Serbians who came from Croatia (Knin, Vukovar) and Bosnia (Banja Luka), and I was surprised to discover that they really do not have that problem. Talking with other Serbs from those countries, I realized that I was wrong and that even though once upon a time all three nationalities lived together and mixed, they did have differencies in their speeches, and one of those was that Serbs don't have that problem which is placed as a subject of this thread.


I would actually say that your previous opinion was correct -- except that there are places in Croatia, and especially in Bosnia, where people distinguish _č_ and _ć_ quite well -- and that you probably overgeneralized from these examples.  I wouldn't say that ethnicity is relevant in any of these examples, but only the regions where these people lived during those critical years when children assimilate the phonology and phonetics of their native dialect. Ethnicity might correlate with dialect only to the extent that people of certain ethnicity might be few in number in a certain region, or might be more likely than others to have moved there as teenagers or adults, when it's already too late to pick up the local dialect like a real native.

I've met many Serbs who grew up in Zagreb, and on average, their problems with _č_ and _ć _are no less severe than those of their ethnic Croatian neighbors. Of course, someone who came to Zagreb after the age of 11-12 from a region where _č_ and _ć _are well distinguished (like myself) is likely to keep that ability. Also, people who grow up in Zagreb, but whose parents moved there as adults, might gain some ability to distinguish them at home, even though they'll pick up the Zagreb pronunciation without /ʨ/ from their peers. 

Similarly, I'm pretty sure that those Serbs who came from Knin or Vukovar speak exactly the same as the Croats of the same generation who grew up in those towns. Generally, people from these regions of Croatia are likely to be able to distinguish _č_ and _ć _better than those from most other places, so I'm not surprised about your story at all.

As for the Bosnian cities and villages, I've already mentioned that the situation there is more complicated, with lots of small-scale local variation. In Banja Luka, where I grew up, almost everyone heard (and pronounced) _č_ and _ć _as clearly distinct phonemes, including myself. There were occasional people who mixed them up, and there were places very close to the city where many more people lacked the distinction, but this definitely didn't depend on ethnicity.


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## natasha2000

> But in Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia, ethnic Serbs (or Croats, etc.) do not speak differently from their neighbors of other South Slavic ethnicities who were born and raised at the same place. With a very few exceptions, in these countries people's language depends only on the region where they grew up, and not at all on ethnicity. A Serb and a Croat who grew up in the same village or town will end up speaking exactly the same dialect. I myself grew up in Banja Luka, and my speech as a kid was absolutely indistinguishable from my Serbian peers*. Thus, there is no point in including ethnicity in these discussions at all.



This is what I thought until I started to get know Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia... But this is what they claim. I do agree with what you say, because it is not logical that one Serb and one Croat living in the same city speak differently. As a matter of fact, I think that the difference they were mentioning was only this one -- mixing ć and ć. As I already told -- I thought that all people from Bosnia speak as my Granny, but then I met some people from Banja Luka, and I was surprised -- they knew the exact diffference between those two letters/sounds, but they still spoke with "Bosnian accent"... I also met some people from Vukovar, and they also made difference between ć and č...

I don't know. I still don't see this logical, but I did hear it with my own ears... Of course, this does not mean anything, because I speak only from my own experience and from what I've heard from other people...


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## natasha2000

> Ethnicity might correlate with dialect only to the extent that people of certain ethnicity might be few in number in a certain region, or might be more likely than others to have moved there as teenagers or adults, whenit's already too late to pick up the local dialect like a real native.


Well this is what I had in mind while I was writing my first post in this thread.


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## vatreno

So what would somebody from an area like... Doboj... be able to distinguish between the  two easily?

Also I have a good friend with two c's in his last name (he is Bosnian)... at the beginning and the end. So would those be hard c's or soft c's? Probably soft


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## vatreno

Also... đ/dž have always been giving me a bit of trouble. I think đ is pronounced more like j, although it is dj at least a friend told me that when to say happy birthday...


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## natasha2000

vatreno said:


> Also I have a good friend with two c's in his last name (he is Bosnian)... at the beginning and the end. So would those be hard c's or soft c's? Probably soft



It depends on WHAT letters are. Unless you write it, nobody can say it for sure. As I said it the same as if you were asking is it LJ or L in Ljubica, or N or NJ in NJUŠKA.... There is no rule for that.



> Also... đ/dž have always been giving me a bit of trouble. I think đ is pronounced more like j, although it is dj at least a friend told me that when to say happy birthday...



It is a soft sound. Rođendan. Sre*ć*an ro*đ*endan (although I think you would rather say _sretan_, but I put _srećan _anyway just for exercise).


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## arwyn

natasha2000 said:


> although I think you would rather say _sretan_,



very likely 

a really nice and useful discussion, thanks to all


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## kontesadora

natasha2000 said:


> vatreno said:
> 
> 
> 
> It's *ćevapčići*.
Click to expand...


No it isn't. It's *č*evapčići.


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## natasha2000

kontesadora said:


> No it isn't. It's *č*evapčići.


Are you absolutely sure?


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## Athaulf

kontesadora said:


> No it isn't. It's *č*evapčići.



No, Natasha is right, and you are wrong. It is *ćevapčići*. This word is indeed misspelled very often with initial _č_ in regions where people can't tell /tʃ/ from /ʨ/, but in dialects where the difference is clear, the initial sound is unambiguously /ʨ/.


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## venenum

I would also like to add that it can also be individual thing: some people just don't have the "ear" to play it by - although my dad grew up the same place I did, a region with a pronounced č/ć differentiation, he's "deaf" for the distinction. He simply can't hear the difference. It's like he's "soundblind" when it comes to č/ć. I met several other people who have the same problem, although their surroundings, families even, make a clear distinction between the two sounds. I have come to a conclusion it's also an innate ability, to a certain degree. 
Arwyn, if you guess it, and mostly guess it right, it could mean you have the mentioned innate ability - "Sprachgefühl", which is often more useful than all the rules you could learn. So, just rely upon your feeling!


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