Word order

Verbs and Tenses

Nouns

Pronouns
   - Personal
   - Possesive
   - Demonstrative
   - Interrogative
   - Reflexive
   - Indefinite or impersonal
   - Universal

Prepositions

Adverbs

Question words

Serbian Personal Pronouns (Lične zamenice)
(PDF version)

A personal pronoun can refer to the person or people speaking (‘first person’), spoken to (‘second person’) or spoken about (‘third person’).

For each person, a pronoun has its distinct form in both singular (ex. ja ‘I’) and plural (ex. mi ‘we’). In addition, depending on its function in a sentence (eg., subject, direct object, indirect object), a pronoun can have seven different case forms: nominative , accusative , genitive , dative , locative , instrumental and vocative . Don’t panic! For many cases pronouns have the same forms (this is called the inflectional syncretism). Table 1 below illustrates that.

The pronominal forms might look overwhelming, but there are some logical patterns. Grammar is logical, for the most part.  My lessons are designed to teach you cases of pronouns slowly, so you can make sense out of the above forms.

First, you probably noted that for dative, accusative and genitive cases, there is more than one pronoun form. For example, the accusative singular pronouns have two forms for each person: mene, me; tebe, te and njega, ga.  The first form is a full (or accented) pronominal form, the second one is truncated, unaccented form, or what grammarians call pronominal clitic form. In everyday speech, we use the truncated or clitic pronoun. The full pronouns are used only for emphasis.

Also, you may observe, for the third person, we have three different forms, which are based on gender: masculine, neuter and feminine. English distinguishes three genders for singular pronouns (he, it, she) but not for plural pronouns. In Serbian however, the three-way gender distinction is made for plural pronouns as well. So for 'they' we have: oni 'they' (masculine); ona 'they' (neuter) and one 'they' (feminine). However, for cases other than nominative plural, the gender is not distinuguished. Finally, something simple!

Unlike English, which does not distinguish between you-singular and you-plural (unelss you are from Texas and say 'y'll'), Serbian has two second prerson pronouns: ti 'you' (singular) and vi 'you' (plural).  In addition, vi can also be used to refer to a single person, as a formal address. This formality is reflected in ortography by capitalizing the first letter in Vi.

Note that only the second person pronouns, ti and vi, have the corresponding vocative case forms, which are equal to the corresponding nominative forms.  Other pronouns lack the vocative case forms, which makes sense, considering that the vocative case is used to call somebody present in the discourse (like 'hey, you!). One cannot address himself/herself (hey, I!) or somebody not present in the discourse (hey, she!).

What happens if you refer to a group that consists of males and females? Like Marija i Jovan 'Maria and Jovan'. The masculine gender wins, as predictable. So, you'll use: oni 'they' (masculine) to refer to Marija and Jovan.

And finally, instrumental singular pronouns, mnom, njim, njom can be used as mnome, njime and njome when there is no preposition preceding. Example:
On se ponosi sa njom. ‘He is proud of her.’
On se ponosi njome.     ‘He is proud of her.’

A few notes about some peculiar examples above.

You might wonder why we have such peculiar word order in example 4: subject – object-verb. Ja te volim, can literally be translated as ‘I you love’.

When we use truncated (clitic) forms of pronouns and verbs, all the clitics must appear immediately after the first accented word or after the first phrase. In the example above, the accusative pronominal clitic te ‘you’ appears after the pronoun ja ‘I’. So, one cannot say: *Ja volim te (though, one can say: ja volim tebe, where ‘tebe’ is a full pronoun).

Please refer to the file on clitics and their order in the sentence.

In example 8, Daj nam vremena, the verb form daj ‘give’ is the imperative verb form.

And now some exercises! If you get stuck or are not sure you got it right, please email me for help.

Exercise 1 – Fill out the appropriate case forms of personal pronouns in sentences below

Using the pronouns below (underlined in the English gloss) insert their appropriate case forms.  For convenience, I have indicated which case of a pronoun goes with which sentence.

For this exercise, use both full and short forms of pronouns. Remember that short or clitic pronouns always go in the second place in the sentence.

Exercise 2 – Translate the following sentences

For this exercise you need to know both the present tense and past tense. If you don’t have a bi-directional Serbian-English-Serbian dictionary, you may go to the website: http://www.krstarica.com/dictionary/ to get the words you need for this exercise.