Word order

Verbs and Tenses

Nouns
   - Noun Declensions
   - Gender of nouns
   - Nominative case
   - Genitive case
   - Dative case
   - Accusative case
   - Locative case
   - Instrumental case
   - Vocative case
   - Irregular nouns

Pronouns

Adjectives

Prepositions

Adverbs

Question words

The Serbian Noun Declension (Deklaracija imenica)
(PDF version)

Nouns (as well as pronouns and adjectives) in Serbian have seven cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, instrumental and vocative, in both singular and plural.

A full declensional paradigm for nouns is shown in Table 2 below. Adjectives and pronouns have similar (yet slightly different) endings and are dealt separately.

But before I suffocate you with further grammar lingo, let me give you a practical example of a noun declension. For fun, I’ll decline my name: ‘Larisa’.

As you can see, Larisa’s name keeps changing its phonological shape (the ending) depending on what function it has in a sentence (subject, direct object, indirect object, object of preposition).

Table 2 below shows declension patterns for all four classes of nouns (masculine, feminine, neuter, singular, plural). This table should be always in front of you when you compose a sentence, until you memorize (yes, you will) all the endings.

To make sense out of this table, you should also read descriptions of usage of each case, given in separate files.

As you can see, there are basically four declension classes, although I lumped neuter nouns in Class I, as many traditional grammars do. Each noun belongs to one of these classes depending on its phonological form of the stem. For example, a noun such as ‘prozor’ (window) has a masculine gender, ‘ljubav’ (love) has a feminine gender, and ‘selo’ has a neuter gender. Of course, here we’re talking about grammatical gender and not semantic gender (maleness/femaleness), as is the case in English.

1. If a noun ends in a consonant, most probably it’s a Class I masculine noun (e.g. prozor ‘window’, kompjuter ‘computer’).
   
2. If the noun ends in vowels –o, or -e in singular nominative case (or dictionary form), it’s a Class I neuter noun (e.g. sel-o ‘village’, mleko ‘milk’,  polj-e ‘field’, prase ‘piglet’). However, there are some male proper names that end in these vowels, and are classified as Class I masculine noun (e.g. Marko, Đorđe, Rade), not neuter nouns. So, semantics wins!
   
3. If the noun ends in –a in singular nominative case, it’s a Class II noun, and these nouns are feminine. There is a small group of male-denoting nouns that also end in –a, (e.g, sudija ‘judge’, Steva – male name, gazda ‘master, landlord’, gospoda ‘gentlemen’). But grammatically, these nouns act as feminine. So, forget about their semantics and decline them as feminine.
   
4. The Class III nouns are all feminine and end in a consonant, just like Class I nouns.  How then to distinguish Class I masculine nouns from Class III feminine nouns? Class III nouns typically denote abstract objects (e. g. ljubav ‘love’, smrt ‘death’, bolest ‘illness’, mladost ‘youth’).
   
   This class of nouns is not productive, i.e. when a new noun that ends in a consonant is imported into the language, it goes into Class I (masculine nouns), not into Class III (feminine nouns).  For example, the loan noun stres (from the English ‘stress’) is classified as a Class I masculine noun.
   For this class of nouns, most cases end in –i, so it’s easy to memorize.

If this is overwhelming, don’t panic! Try to tackle each case separately and learn when to use it. You can do that by browsing through individual noun-case pages and doing exercises given there.

*There is a group of ‘reflexive’ verbs (verbs that always occur with the reflexive pronoun se) that take the genitive case, not the accusative case. For details, read about the usage of genitive case.