This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
The locative of topic: o + locative, one Serbian word for “about”, “on” and “of”
You have already met the locative from two sides. It is the case of place, answering “where?” (u gradu, in town; na poslu, at work), and it is the case required by the prepositions u, na, o, po, pri. In “Locative forms” you also saw its second question, o kome? o čemu? (about whom? about what?): Govorim o filmu, “I’m talking about the film”. That second question is what this lesson is about. This is the locative of topic: the locative saying not where something stands, but what a conversation, a thought or a book is about.
This is one of the easiest corners of Serbian grammar for an English speaker. English spreads the idea of “topic” over a handful of prepositions: a book about the war, a lecture on history, to think of someone, to agree on a price. Serbian takes one single preposition, o, and puts the locative after it. No choosing. There are two traps, though, both in verbs: Serbian can say “think about someone” in two ways, misliti o and misliti na, with different shades of meaning. And “worry about someone” is not brinuti o at all.
One o for “about”, “on” and “of”
The form is simple: in the sense of topic it is always o + locative, and o never changes its shape. English “a” turns into “an” before a vowel; Serbian o stays a single short o before any word, vowel or not, pronoun or noun: o oku (about the eye), o meni (about me), o svemu (about everything). With the accusative, o has another meaning, hitting or touching: udariti o zid, to hit against the wall, as in “Accusative prepositions (direction)”.
Two things to notice. The “word for word” column has no “a” and no “the”: Serbian has no articles, so knjiga o ratu can be “a book about the war”, “the book about the war” or “a book about war”, and the context decides. And look at the line with đ (said like the d in British duty): rođaku, “about a relative”. The word is in the locative (rođak → o rođaku), exactly as it would be in “about the town” (o gradu); Srbija gives o Srbiji, just like u Srbiji.
Verbs of speech and thought: which ones take o
The topic does not live only with nouns (knjiga o…). It also comes with a whole set of verbs, all those that have to do with speaking, thinking and feeling about something. They are easiest to learn as a list, with one test: if you can continue the action with the question “about what?”, it will almost certainly take o + locative.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
The locative of topic: o + locative, one word for “about”, “on”, “of”
Besides “where?”, the locative answers o kome? o čemu? (about whom? about what?) and introduces the topic. The preposition is always o, never changing its form; there is no second, chattier word. After o of topic comes the locative, as in u gradu. (With the accusative, o means hitting: udariti o zid.)