Prosodic Variants of Polysyllabic Words on the Public RTV Service in the Republic of Srpska

The monograph entitled Prosodic Variants of Polysyllabic Words in the Public Broadcasting Service of the Republic of Srpska presents the results of research based on the analysis and monitoring of accentual variability on Radio Television of the Republic of Srpska since 2016, with particular intensity within the research project Resources of the Serbian Language in the Contemporary Media Discourse of the Republic of Srpska (2024–2026). The research corpus was established on the basis of the speech of professional speakers—news anchors and reporters—whose dialectal foundation belongs to the northwestern branch of the Herzegovinian-Krajina dialect, centered around Banja Luka as the largest urban area.

The analyzed material shows that variability in pronunciation occurs in polysyllabic words, particularly in nouns with the suffixes -ost and -anje, adjectives with the suffixes -ski, -an, -šnji, words with various prefixes and prefixoids (e.g., anti-, infra-, kontra-, multi-, elektro-, kardio-, makro-, hidro-), as well as in verbs of foreign origin ending in the suffix -ovati.

Since the codification of the Serbian accentual system, prosodic doublets have represented an open question and one of the most complex phenomena in the accentual norm of the Serbian language. This publication not only presents new data on accentual doublets, but also, based on a corpus of speech specific to the Public Service of the Republic of Srpska, demonstrates—on scientifically grounded foundations—the trend of further development of our accentual system, thereby providing a very solid basis for addressing prosodic variants in contemporary Serbian.