Lingomir
A1 — beginnerGender, number and noun classes

Grammatical gender

Lesson opening

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

Grammatical gender: three families of nouns

So far we have dealt with sounds and letters: how Serbian sounds and how it is written. With this lesson grammar begins: how Serbian words are built and how they change. The first stone is gender. Every Serbian noun belongs to one of three "families": masculine, feminine or neuter. Gender decides the ending of the adjective next to a noun, the pronoun that replaces it, and the shape of the past tense. Without it you cannot even say "my", "good" or "this", because each has three different forms.

English has no grammatical gender, so the idea needs a moment. In English, "he", "she" and "it" follow meaning: a man is "he", a table is "it". Serbian sorts every noun into one of three classes, whether it names a person, a thing or an idea. The classes are called masculine, feminine and neuter, but for most nouns that is only a label: bread is not male and coffee is not female. Gender is a property of the word, and you see it in its ending and in the agreement of the words around it. Meaning counts only for people. If you have met le/la in French, el/la in Spanish or der/die/das in German, you know the principle; Serbian has three genders like German, no articles, and an ending that gives the gender away far more reliably.

The last-letter rule

Here is the whole rule in one table. Look at the ending of the dictionary form and the gender is in front of you:

This rule covers the vast majority of nouns; rely on it. A masculine noun has no ending and stops on a consonant: grad (city), novac (money), račun (the bill). Feminine ends in -a: pijaca (market), cena (price), prodavnica (shop). Neuter ends in -o or -e: vino (wine), pismo (a letter you post), sunce (sun), dete (child). Compare German, where nothing in Löffel, Gabel, Messer (spoon, fork, knife) tells you they are masculine, feminine and neuter. A Serbian ending almost always tells the truth.

New words and loanwords obey the same rule. internet and kompjuter end in a consonant, so they are masculine; pica (pizza) and banka (bank) end in -a, so they are feminine. The ending is a working mechanism: show a Serb any unfamiliar noun and from its tail they know its gender and how it will change. That is why grammar starts here: gender is the key to every later door of the case system.

Why gender matters: agreement

Gender on its own is just a label; its power is that neighbouring words take their cue from it. This is called agreement. English adjectives never change: good bread, good coffee, good wine. In Serbian the adjective, the word for "this", the pronoun and even the past-tense verb match the gender of the noun:

See the pattern? “Good” ends like the nouns: dobar with no ending, dobra in -a, dobro in -o. “This” almost does: ova, ovo, but the masculine is ovaj. The noun's gender echoes in every word attached to it: ovaj grad, ova voda, ovo selo ("this city, this water, this village"). Pronouns too: on, ona, ono mean "he", "she", "it", but a thing takes the pronoun of its gender, so bread is on, coffee is ona, and only a neuter noun like vino is ono. Without the gender you cannot build a single correct phrase. More in "Adjective agreement" and, for on/ona/ono, "Personal pronouns (nominative)".

Cheat sheet

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Grammatical gender: three families of nouns

Every noun has one of three genders: masculine (muški rod), feminine (ženski rod), neuter (srednji rod). It belongs to the word, not the thing (bread is not male), never changes, and about nine times out of ten shows in the last letter of the dictionary form (nominative singular). Dictionaries mark it m / ž / s.

The last-letter rule

Loanwords too: internet, kompjuter m; pica (pizza), banka (bank) ž.

Agreement

“Good” and “one” end like the nouns: dobar hleb, jedna kafa, dobro vino; masculine “this” is ovaj. Things take the pronoun of their gender: bread is on, coffee ona. Past tense too: radio / radila / radilo (“worked”; the masculine ends in -o). jedan = "one", not "a".

Two exceptions and a trap