Word order

Verbs and Tenses

Nouns

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

Prepositions

Adverbs

Question words

Serbian Possesive Pronouns (Prisvojne zamenice)
(PDF version)

As the name says, possessive pronouns generally denote possession: moja knjiga ‘my book’, njihove cipele ‘their shoes’.

Just like personal pronouns, possessive pronouns have distinct forms for each person (first, second, third) and for number (singular, plural), as well as for case (nominative , accusative , genitive , dative , locative , instrumental ).

You can see how the possessive meaning ‘her’ changes its final vowel depending on the gender (and also number!) of the noun. In this respect, possessives behave like demonstrative pronouns and adjectives , which also ‘agree’ with the following noun in case, gender and number.

The following table gives the whole declension paradigm for possessive pronouns. I didn’t spell out all the possible forms since it would appear overwhelming (to you and the paper). Instead, only the masculine singular possessive forms are shown (in red) while the endings for other forms are given in parentheses. All you need to do is take that masculine form as the base and expand it with the corresponding vowel endings in parentheses.

Table 2 below gives some examples that would help make sense of the declensional paradigm of Table 1.

Reflexive Possessive Pronouns  - svoj

In addition to these possessive forms, Serbian also has a reflexive possessive pronoun svoj 'self's' which declines exactly like the personal possessive pronouns above. However, this pronoun doesn’t distinguish gender (svoj works for all three genders).

Also, there is a possessive interrogative pronoun: čiji ‘whose’, which is used to ask questions about the possessor.

For more details see serbian interrogative pronouns.

Examples
Čija je ovo knjiga?         Whose book is this?   
Ovo je moja knjiga.        This is my book.

Examples 6, 7 and 8 warrant some explanation.

Notice that in examples 6 and 7, the possessive is accusative, masculine, singular meaning ‘my’, but the forms are different!

Hopefully, you’ll recall my note when we discussed the accusative case for nouns which explains that for the accusative masculine singular nouns, the ending depends whether the noun is animate or non-animate. If the noun is non-animate, like stan ‘apartment’ in example 6 above, then the accusative ending equals the nominative ending. And this rule applies to the possessive pronoun since it agrees in whatever features the following noun has. So, in 6.we have: On je video moj* stan (He saw my apartment)

Exercise 1 – Fill out the appropriate case forms of possessive 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, if applicable.

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.