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A1 — beginnerThe nominative case

Nominative forms

Lesson opening

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

The nominative: the dictionary form and the case of the subject

You can already tell a noun's gender and make its plural. Now it is time to name the frame that holds all of that together: case. Without saying so, every Serbian noun you have met so far has been in one and the same case, the nominative: the form the dictionary gives you, and the form that marks the subject, the one who does something. The whole case system of Serbian starts here.

Case can sound exotic to an English speaker, but English has it too, in a small corner: its pronouns. You say I see him but He sees me; we becomes us, they becomes them, who becomes whom. The job in the sentence changed, and the job changed the shape. Serbian does this with every noun, not just with pronouns. In this lesson we bring the singular and plural of all three genders into one picture of the nominative and see what it does in a sentence.

What the nominative does in a sentence

The nominative has two main jobs. The first is to be the subject, the one who performs the action. In each of these sentences the noun in the nominative is the "who" or "what" that does something:

Here žena, konobar and gradovi are the subjects, and all three are in the nominative. To check, ask the case question: Ko donosi račun? ("Who brings the bill?") Konobar. Šta raste? ("What is growing?") Gradovi. The second job is the noun that follows the verb biti ("to be"): in a sentence of the type "X is Y", Y is in the nominative as well. Grammars call it the predicate noun, or simply "the noun after to be":

Notice what is missing: Serbian has no articles, so "a waiter", "the waiter" and "waiter" are all just konobar. Formal English has a rule close to the Serbian one, the nominative after to be: hence the textbook "It is I", not "It is me". English only recommends it; Serbian always does it. The forms of biti and the rules for matching subject and predicate come in "biti in the present" and "Subject & predicate nominative". Here it is enough that both jobs use the nominative, so everything below about its forms holds for both.

The nominative of pronouns

A subject need not be a noun; it can be a pronoun, and pronouns have a nominative of their own. These are the words for "I", "you", "he" and the rest that you already met in the greetings:

These are the nominative forms of the pronouns, the case of the subject: Ja sam konobar ("I am a waiter"), Oni su gosti ("They are guests"). In the other cases the pronouns change a great deal, much as English I becomes me and he becomes him, but that comes later. One detail will surprise you: where English has a single "they", Serbian has three, by gender: oni (masculine, and for mixed groups), one (feminine) and ona (neuter). A group of women is one, never oni. The full set of personal pronouns, and the Serbian habit of leaving them out (a Serb usually says just Konobar sam, "I'm a waiter", without ja, because the verb already says who), is the subject of the lesson "Personal pronouns (nominative)".

Cheat sheet

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The nominative: the dictionary form and the case of the subject

A case (padež) is the form that shows a noun's job in the sentence. Serbian has seven: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative (for calling someone), instrumental, locative. The nominative (nominativ) comes first: the dictionary form, answering ko? ("who?") and šta? ("what?"). In English it is the case of I, he, she, we, they, who.

What the nominative does

  • Subject: the one who acts.
  • Dictionary form: a word on its own goes in the nominative singular.
  • The noun after biti ("to be"): in "X is Y", Y is nominative too. No article: Serbian has none.

Pronouns in the nominative

The nominative in the three declensions

The 3rd declension is new: feminine nouns in a consonant (noć night, stvar thing, reč word, ljubav love) take -i, not "noće", not "noćovi". Both feminine declensions agree alike: gender governs agreement, declension the word's own endings. Men in -a (tata, deda, gazda) are masculine by gender, 2nd declension by endings.

After biti: nominative in every tense

Case beats word order

The nominative marks the subject by itself, so the words can move: Konobar donosi kafu. = Kafu donosi konobar. The waiter brings the coffee: same meaning, different emphasis.