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Serbian Nouns
Besides verbs, nouns constitute the major construct in any
language, Serbian included.
Traditionally, nouns are defined as parts of speech that
denote a person (e.g., Jim, student), a place (Belgrade), a
thing (bread) or an abstraction. In addition nouns, like
verbs, can describe an action (e.g., assassination,
invasion); however, unlike verbs, nouns do not indicate
tense, i.e., the time of an event.
Each noun in Serbian is marked with an inherent gender.
Serbian nouns are marked for three genders: masculine,
feminine
and neuter. These genders are grammatical, as opposed
to natural or real genders since inanimate objects can be
marked for masculine or feminine gender. For example, the
noun ‘kuća’ (house) is feminine while ‘stan’ (apartment)
is masculine. The gender of these nouns is determined by
their ending, not their meaning.
Serbian has two numbers for nouns: singular, referring to
one object, and plural, referring to more than one object.
Example: kuća vs. kuće (house vs. houses).
We saw for verbs that verbs change their
endings depending on their usage with respect to tense,
aspect and voice and also the person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) or
gender of the subject. These inflections of verbs are called
conjugations or verb classes.
Analogous to verbs, nouns also change their form depending
on their function in the sentence: e.g., subject, object,
indirect object, etc. and depending on their gender
(masculine, feminine and neuter). This is called case
(or ‘padež’).
Serbian is a case-rich language, like Latin. Serebian has 7
cases! These are nominative, accusative, genitive, dative,
instrumental, locative and vocative. Dative and locative
cases have the same endings. Learning these 7 cases (for
both singular and plural, and also for the three genders!)
is the hardest task a beginner in Serbian will face. I hope
that these pages will make this task easier. My suggestion
is to tackle one case at a time for each noun, starting with
the nominative case.
| Declension or
classes of nouns |
Related to case, we also have declensions or classes of
nouns. Declensions refer to inflectional patterns of nouns
indicating grammatical features such as number
(singular, plural),
gender
(masculine, feminine, neuter) and case (nominative,
accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, locative and
vocative).
There are four declension classes in Serbian. Each
noun belongs to one of these classes depending on its
phonological form of the stem.
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