Serbo-Croatian - Orthography

Orthography

Serbo-Croatian orthography is supposed to be almost completely phonetic. Thus, every word is allegedly spelled exactly as it is pronounced. In practice, the writing system does not take into account allophones which occur as a result of interaction between words:

• bit će – pronounced biće (and only written separately in Croatian)
• od toga – pronounced otoga (in many vernaculars)
• iz čega – pronounced iščega (in many vernaculars)

Also, there are some exceptions, mostly applied to foreign words and compounds, that favor morphological/etymological over phonetic spelling:

• postdiplomski (postgraduate) – pronounced pozdiplomski

One systemic exception is that the consonant clusters ds and dš do not change into ts and tš (although d tends to be unvoiced in normal speech in such clusters):

• predstava (show)
• odšteta (damages)

Only a few words are intentionally "misspelled", mostly in order to resolve ambiguity:

• šeststo (six hundred) – pronounced šesto (to avoid confusion with "šesto" )
• prstni (adj., finger) – pronounced prsni (to avoid confusion with "prsni" )