Accusative forms

Lesson opening

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The accusative: the forms of the direct object

You know the nominative: the dictionary form, the case of the subject. Now for the first case that really changes the word. This is the accusative (in Serbian, akuzativ), the case of the direct object: the person or thing an action is aimed at. When the waiter brings coffee and you see the city, "coffee" and "the city" are direct objects, and in Serbian they stand in the accusative.

English still shows this case, but only in a few pronouns. You say He sees the waiter, but The waiter sees him: the same person, two jobs, two shapes. Him is a leftover of the case system of Old English. English nouns gave up the difference long ago (the waiter is the same in both sentences); Serbian does to many of its nouns what English still does to he.

This lesson is about the forms: how kafa becomes kafu, how konobar becomes konobara, and why grad and selo do not change at all. We cover every gender and declension, singular and plural. Which verbs take the accusative, and how it works in live speech, is the next lesson, "Direct object".

Nouns in -a: -a becomes -u

Start with the cleanest and most frequent rule. Nouns ending in -a (almost all of them feminine: the second declension) swap their -a for -u in the accusative singular. One ending, and it makes no difference whether the noun names a person or a thing: always -u.

The verbs are all "I" forms (vidim "I see", pijem "I drink", hoću "I want", čitam "I read"); the ending already says who, so no word for "I" is needed. The men in -a from the last lesson follow the same pattern as žena: tata ("dad") becomes tatu, as in Vidim tatu, "I see Dad".

You may have heard this ending already. In the polite Jednu kafu, molim, "One coffee, please", the word kafu is in the accusative, because the coffee is being ordered: it is the object. And the word for "one" goes into the feminine accusative with it: jednu, not "jedan". Learn jednu kafu and jednu vodu as units.

Masculine nouns: alive or not?

In masculine nouns the accusative splits in two, depending on whether the word names something alive. Serbian sorts masculine nouns into animate (people and animals) and inanimate (things, places, ideas), and gives them different accusatives:

The rule is short and worth learning by heart. An inanimate masculine noun keeps its nominative form in the accusative: Vidim grad, "I see the city", and the word has not moved. An animate masculine noun takes the form of the genitive, which means it adds -a: Vidim konobara, "I see the waiter". More animate nouns: student → studenta, prijatelj ("friend") → prijatelja, brat ("brother") → brata, sin ("son") → sina, and names as well: Marko → Marka.

Here Serbian comes closest to he/him: konobar is the waiter doing something, konobara the waiter it is done to. The city gets no second shape: grad/grad against konobar/konobara is the whole rule.

Cheat sheet

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The accusative: the forms of the direct object

The accusative (akuzativ) is the case of the direct object, the person or thing an action is aimed at. English shows it only in pronouns: he sees → sees him. Questions: koga? ("whom?", a living being), šta? ("what?", a thing). In many words it looks like the nominative: a rule, not a missing case.

Every class, singular and plural

Three working rules

Words that agree