Learning to say the place names, personal names, and technical terms encountered in East European and Balkan history is not too daunting. The major languages of the region are reasonably phonetic: that is, within a given language, the same letters or letter combinations are generally pronounced the same way. Once you get used to how letters and clusters are said in a language, you can come up with a good approximation of how a word or name is said -- that is, if your text gives the essential diacritical marks, which many English-language texts do not do.

For the most part basic vowels in these languages sound like the common vowels of European languages. These are different from American vowels, as shown in the following chart. Any deviations for a particular language appear in the chart for that language. Vowels may be long or short, but all are pure, not diphthongized as in English. Where an umlaut (as in ö) or an accent mark (as in ă or î) changes the sound of a vowel, this is shown under the particular language below.

In the treatment of each language below, the pronunciation is given only for letters and letter combinations whose sound is strange or unexpected. While the charts give English equivalents, the sounds of East European and Balkan languages are actually more like those of other European languages (often like Russian or Italian) than like English sounds.

The Albanian language is Indo-European, but it has no close relations among European languages. Albanians adopted a Latin alphabet only in 1908, so the spelling corresponds well to modern pronunciation. To indicate special sounds there are a few two-letter combinations (such as nj or xh) and diacritical marks (only ç and ë). Stress tends to fall on the last or next-to-last syllable, though not usually on a final ë.

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Bulgarian is a Slavic language, closely related to Serbo-Croatian, and written like Serbian in a Cyrillic (Greek-derived) alphabet. We normally encounter Bulgarian words and names only after they have been transliterated into our Latin alphabet, and most of the work of making them pronounceable for English-speakers is done by the transliteration. Vowel sounds are the main thing to note. Unfortunately, in Bulgarian there is no easy rule for where the stress falls.

The Bulgarian language makes no distinction between long and short vowels; in effect, all the usual vowels are short. There are also three additional vowels, each transliterated in more than one way.

In Bulgarian a voiced consonant at the end of a word or immediately before an unvoiced consonant is pronounced like its unvoiced equivalent. (Thus both v's in "Zhivkov" sound like f's.) Similarly, an unvoiced consonant immediately before a voiced consonant is pronounced like its voiced equivalent.

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Czech pronunciation is made easier by the fact that stress is nearly always on the first syllable. Acute accent marks on vowels (e.g., á) indicate length, which is independent of stress.

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We normally encounter words and names in modern Greek only after they have been transliterated from the Greek alphabet into our Latin alphabet, and much of the work of making them pronounceable for English-speakers is done by the transliteration. However, systems of transliteration vary somewhat; and there are conventional English versions of many Greek proper names that follow no particular system. As for stress, the Greeks themselves mark it in each word with a stress-accent; unfortunately, these marks are not usually carried over in transliteration.

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Hungarian

Hungarian (or Magyar) is a Finno-Ugric language with no European relatives except Estonian and Finnish. Stress is always on the first syllable; acute accent marks on vowels (e.g., á) indicate length, which is independent of stress. Doubled consonants are held longer than single consonants.

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Polish looks particularly strange, with its consonant clusters and accent marks as well as plenty of k's and w's and z's. But the language is strictly phonetic, so once you get used to how letters or clusters are said, the pronunciation is not hard. Stress nearly always falls on the next-to-last syllable.