New: Heart of life

There is a huge variety of names of relatives in Serbian language. This is very confusing to children and foreigners studying Serbian. When the foreigners ask their Serbian language teacher to explain it, the teacher usually comments ‘It is complicated.’ before starting explaining. And it is complicated, but it can be made easier to learn.

Therefore Slovce published the simplified version of the family tree with the closest relatives as well as ancestors and descendants. The issue is called Heart of life (Srce života in Serbian). The family relations are graphically presented. English and Serbian names of the relatives are shown. This also illustrates the complexity of Serbian names for relatives. For instance, ‘uncle’ can be translated as ‘stric’, ‘ujak’ or ‘teča’ in Serbian. That depends if this relative is coming from the mother’s or father’s part of the family and if he is a relative by blood or by marriage.

This variety of Serbian names for relatives makes the language rich, but at the same time difficult to learn. Therefore, the Heart of life shows only the closest and most often used names for the relatives. It is meant for older children and adults. It can be downloaded from page Download[9+] and printed out in a form of a poster (size A3).