biti in the present

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The verb biti in the present tense

In the last lesson we looked at how a verb is built: the infinitive and the two stems. Now comes the first verb in full, and the most important one of all: biti “to be”. It works as a copula, a linking verb: it is what turns a string of words into a statement. “Ja student” is not a sentence yet, just a fragment; Ja sam student “I am a student” is a complete thought. The tiny word sam does all the work, exactly as “am” does in English.

You have met this verb more than once already without taking it apart. Kako si? “How are you?” hides si, and Drago mi je “Nice to meet you” hides je. In “Personal pronouns (nominative)” you saw that the short sam never comes first (Student sam), and in “Adjective agreement” that je is never left out (Kafa je dobra). Now we gather all the forms, with the negative and the question. The main news is small: in the present tense biti has two parallel sets of forms, a full one and a short one, and you need to know which goes where.

Two sets: short and full

Here are both sets in one table. On the left, the short form, the everyday workhorse; on the right, the full form, kept for special cases (more on them below). Grammars count three "persons", in the singular and in the plural: the first is the speaker (I, we), the second the listener (you), the third anyone else (he, she, it, they).

A word on sound: j is always the y of yes, so je sounds like "yeh" and jesam like "YE-sam", never with the j of jam. The full forms are stressed on the first syllable. The short forms carry no stress at all: say them lightly, run together with the word in front of them.

Usually the short form is the one you need:

Notice: an adjective after the copula agrees with the subject in gender and number: umoran (he is tired), umorna (she is tired), umorni (they are tired). English adjectives never change; Serbian ones do, as you saw in “Adjective agreement”. The copula je itself stays the same whether the subject is a man, a woman or a thing; it changes only with person and number (Oni su umorni).

The same copula also answers the question "where?". Then biti means not "to be someone" but "to be somewhere", and the form stays exactly the same, just as English uses "is" for both:

When to use the full form

The full (stressed) form is used where "to be" carries the weight of the sentence, or where the short form cannot stand because of its position. The main cases:

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The verb biti in the present tense

biti “to be” is the copula: it links the subject to a noun or adjective (On je lekar “He is a doctor”) and also means “to be somewhere” (Ana je kod kuće “Ana is at home”). In the present the copula is obligatory, as in English. Two sets: short (clitic, unstressed, never first) and full (stressed); same meaning, different job in the sentence.

All forms: short · full · negative

Which form to use

The negative at work

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