Serbian grammar

The following is an overview of the grammar of the Serbian Language

The Serbian language is a South Slavic language. Serbian nouns and adjectives are inflected for number and gender, and 7 noun cases. [see [http://www.lztranslation.com/serbian_grammar.html] .]

Nouns

Serbian nouns have the categories grammatical gender, number, and case. A noun has one of three specific grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural)

Case System

Nouns (as well as pronouns and adjectives) in Serbian have seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental and locative, in both singular and plural. But before the cases suffocates you with further grammar lingo, let me give you a practical example of a noun declension. For fun, I’ll decline my name: ‘Лариса’

The number of cases, in concert with a non-fixed word-order, can make Serbian difficult to learn for speakers of languages without a strong case system.

Declension of proper name ‘Larisa” (feminine noun)

Ларис"а" је добра наставница. = "Larisa is a good teacher"(subject; Лариса = nominative case)""

Видим Ларис"у". = "I see Larisa. "(Ларису = ‘direct’ object; Ларису = accusative case)""

Он даје књигу Ларис"и". = "He is giving a book to Larisa. "(Лариси = ‘indirect’ object; Лариси = dative case)""

Идем са Ларис"oм". = "I am going with Larisa. "(Ларисом = object of preposition ‘са’; Ларисом = instrumental case)""

Идем код Ларис"e". = "I’m going to Larisa’s house. "(Ларисе = object of preposition ‘код’; Ларисе = genitive case)""

Ларис"o"! = "Larisa!.(Ларисo = vocative; when calling someone)"

Noun declesion

There are seven cases in Serbian: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, Instrumental and locative. It is commonly mistaken, that locative and dative have the same form, and that morphologically the number of cases is six. The accent is in many examples different in dative and locative: cf. стрâни ('to the site' dative)/ (на) стрáни ('on the site' locative) or (ка) сâту ('to the clock tower')/ (на) сáту ('on the clock').

Comparison

Adjectives have three degrees of comparison: positive , comparative and superlative . The positive form is identical to all the aforementioned forms. The other two are formed regularly, by changing the word (for the comparative) and нај (for the superlative) before the positive form.
The first words is the positive then comparative then superlative

Regular verbs

The conjugation system of regular verbs is rather complex. There are several classes of verbs distinguished according to certain features verbs within a class share.
The verb is Радити ("To work")

Numbers

In Serbian, a lot of numbers take gender. When talking to a person (or a group of people), Serbian becomes strict with identifying their gender. Also, the "1" and "2" take gender when talking about nouns.

See also

Croatian grammar

References