Himna Svetom Savi

Sveti Sava — born Rastko Nemanjić, the youngest son of Stefan Nemanja — became the first archbishop of an independent Serbian church in 1219. He is remembered less as a churchman than as the man who put Serbian education on its feet, which is why his day, 27 January, is still the school holiday: Savindan. The hymn below is sung in schools across Serbia on that morning, and most people know at least the first verse without ever having decided to learn it.

Two things make it useful as a language exercise.

The first is the vocative. A hymn is an address — it talks to someone — so the case Serbian reserves for calling out is everywhere in it. That case is disappearing from casual speech in some Slavic languages; in Serbian it is alive, and this text is full of it.

Nominativ	Vokativ
Sava	Savo	calling him by name
otac	oče	note the consonant change
Bog	Bože	g → ž
gospodin	gospodine	the ordinary -e ending

The second is the vocabulary, which is deliberately old. Hymns preserve words that ordinary Serbian has moved past — the sort of thing you meet in liturgy, poetry and nineteenth-century writing, and almost nowhere else. You are not expected to start using them. You are expected to recognise them, which is a different and easier skill, and the one that lets you read anything written before about 1900.

Do the exercise once with the text in front of you and once without. The second time is when it starts to sound like a song rather than a paragraph.