Genitive singular forms

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

The genitive: singular forms

Of all the Serbian cases other than the nominative, the genitive (genitiv) is the hardest-working. It says whose something is, what is missing, where you have come from, whose place you are staying at, how much of something has been poured. No other case has so many roles, so its forms are worth learning early and well: they turn up at every step. You already know one of them: the accusative of animate masculine nouns is the same as the genitive, as in vidim konobara (I see the waiter) from the lesson “Animacy”.

This lesson is about the singular forms: how grad (city) becomes grada, žena (woman) becomes žene, and noć (night) becomes noći. You know the three declensions from “The three declensions” (a declension is a family of nouns that share one set of endings); here we sort the genitive endings by them and try the genitive out in its main jobs. The genitive plural, with its own endings and the fleeting a coming back (pet pasa, five dogs), is a separate topic (the lesson “Genitive plural”).

First declension (masculine and neuter): -a

The most populous class. Masculine nouns ending in a consonant or in -o and all neuter nouns take -a in the genitive singular. Just add -a to the stem (for neuters and masculines in -o, in place of the final vowel: Marko → Marka, auto → auta):

Neuters take the same -a, but a few of them grow a longer stem first: dete → deteta (child), ime → imena (name), vreme → vremena (time). The longer stem stays in the other singular cases too (detetu, imenom), so learn such a word together with its genitive.

Second declension (nouns in -a): -e

Nouns in -a are mostly feminine, but a few masculine ones belong here too: tata (dad), deda (grandpa), vojvoda (duke). In the genitive they swap -a for -e:

Notice that the genitive singular žene looks exactly like the nominative plural žene (women). Serbian often lets one form fill two cells of the table. Which of the two you are looking at is told by the context and the words around it: in torba žene (the woman’s bag) it is the genitive, in Žene rade (the women are working) the plural, and čaša vode is clearly “a glass of water”, not “a glass, waters”.

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

The genitive: singular forms

The genitive (genitiv) is the hardest-working case: “whose”, “from where”, “how much”, “none of”. Questions: koga? (of whom? people), čega? (of what? things). The singular ending is fixed by the declension; dictionaries print this form right after the headword (grad, -a; noć, -i).

Three declensions, three endings

Prepositions + genitive

Roles of the genitive