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Croatian grammar is very similar to other languages of the South Central Slavic diasystem and descends from Old Croatian which was used until the 16th century It differs little from the languages used in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. There are also substantial differences with the Kajkavian and Chakavian dialects spoken in Croatia.

Croatian has three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), a relatively large number of grammatical cases (7) but few verb tenses.

This page outlines the grammar of Croatian.

Nouns

The two most important things regarding nouns in Croatian are the seven cases and the so-called "fleeting 'a'".

Noun endings in singular

NOTE: Masculine singular animate accusative is treated specially and gets an -a ending.

Examples of declensions

Singular (The feminine and neuter have two forms, feminine ending in 'a' or in a consonant and neuter ending in 'o' or 'e'.)

Plural

Dative, locative, and instrumental in plural are same for all nouns. This holds for adjectives as well.

Adjectives

Some of the declensions for adjectives are the same as for nouns, and so they might rhyme: velika kuća (sing. nom.), veliku kuću (sing. acc.). Others might be confusing: jednim klikom ("with one click", sing. masc. instrum.).

Singular

Plural

• Note: animate objects (people and animals) are treated differently in the singular masculine accusative. In this case, it is the same as singular masculine genitive. It is considered accusative even though it looks like the genitive. Example: Vidim velikog psa ("I see a big dog").

• Note: most adjectives ending in consonant-'a'-consonant (for example: dobar, "good"), the 'a' disappears when any letter is added. Dobar becomes, for example, dobri, dobra, dobrog, dobru, dobrim, dobrom, dobre, and dobrih, according to case and number.

Verbs

Croatian verbs are normally only conjugated in the present indicative. Other tenses and moods require auxiliaries. Much more complicated is verbal aspect: the perfective and the imperfective.

Tense

Verbs tenses can be present, past, futures I and II, pluperfect, aorist and imperfect, the latter two are not used often in daily speech, especially the imperfect.

• Past uses the present of biti ("to be") plus the perfect participle, e.g. radio sam (or sam radio, order depending on the sentence).
• Present uses the indicative forms with their conjugational suffixes, without any auxiliaries, e.g. putuješ.
• Future I uses the (reduced) present of htjeti ("will" or "to want") plus the infinitive, e.g. ćemo kuhati (or kuhat ćemo, in which case the -i of the infinitive marker -ti is elided).
• Future II uses the perfective future of biti (the only verb with a simple future) plus the perfect participle, e.g. budu išli.
• Pluperfect, which is not often used, uses the composite past plus the perfect participle, e.g. bio sam došao.

Mood

Besides the indicative, Croatian uses the imperative, subjunctive, conditional I and II, and the optative. Imperative forms vary according to the type of the verb, and is formed by adding the appropriate morpheme to a verbal stem. The subjunctive uses da plus the indicative. The conditional I uses the aorist of biti plus perfect participle, while conditional II consists of the perfect participle of biti, the aorist of the same verb, and the perfect participle of the main verb. Optative is in its form identical to the perfect participle. It is used by speakers to express a strong wish, e.g. Živio predsjednik! 'Long live the president!', Dabogda ti se sjeme zatrlo! (an archaic and dialectal curse), etc. The optative may be translated into English by an imperative construction, with set phrases (such as the already exemplified 'long live'), or by use of the modal verb may.

Verbal aspect

Verbal aspect is distinguished in English by using the simple or progressive (continuous) forms. 'He washed the dishes' indicates that the action was finished; 'He was washing the dishes' indicates that the action was ongoing (progressive). Croatian, like all Slavic languages, has something similar.

To compare the meanings of the different aspects with verbal aspect in English, one should know three basic aspects: completed (may be called preterit, aorist, or perfect according to the language in question), progressive (on-going but not completed yet, durative), and iterative (habitual or repeated). English uses one aspect for completed and iterative and another for progressive. Croatian uses one for completed and another for iterative and progressive.

Verbal aspect is the most challenging part of Croatian grammar. It exists in all other Slavic languages, but learners of Croatian who do know any other Slavic languages may never learn to use aspect correctly, though they will be understood with only rare problems. While there are bi-aspectual verbs as well, primarily those derived by adding the suffix '-irati' or '-ovati', majority of verbs not derived in such a manner are either imperfective (svršeni) or perfective (nesvršeni). Almost all of single aspectual verbs are part of a perfective/imperfective pair of verbs. When learning a verb, one must learn its verbal aspect, and the other verb for the opposite verbal aspect, e.g., prati ("to wash", imperfective) goes with oprati ("to wash", perfective).

Regarding aspect, verbs come in two types. In one type, the root verb is imperfective, such as prati ("to wash"). In this case the perfective is formed by adding the prefix 'o', as in oprati. In the other type, the root verb is perfective, such as dignuti ("to lift"). In this case the imperfective is formed by adding a suffix or modifying the root and adding a suffix: dizati.

A pattern which often arises can be illustrated with pisati, "to write". Pisati is imperfective, so we need to add a prefix, in this case 'na-', to make it perfective: napisati. But if we add other prefixes to modify the meaning, the basic verb becomes perfective: zapisati ("to write down") or prepisati ("to copy by hand"). Since these basic verbs are perfective, we need to add a suffix to make them imperfective: zapisivati and prepisivati.

Many perfective verbs change their vowels instead of adding a suffix to become imperfective: roditi - rađati. Typically, the '-iti' ending becomes '-jati', where 'j' merges with the preceding consonant palatalizing it.

Conjugation of verbs

There are three conjugations of verbs:

• 1. 'a': almost all verbs that have this conjugation end in '-ati'.
  2. 'e': verbs ending in '-nuti' and all irregular verbs (as in the example below). Verbs ending in '-ovati', '-ivati' become 'uje' when conjugated (trovati, "to poison", is trujem, truje etc.)
  3. 'i': almost all verbs ending in '-jeti' or '-iti' use this conjugation.

Syntax

Croatian has a rich case structure that is reflected in the declension of nouns and adjectives. This makes syntax of little use and allows for a great deal of freedom in word order. In English, for example, the difference between "Man bites dog" and "Dog bites man" is shown by syntax. In Croatian Čovjek grize psa and Čovjeka grize pas have the same word order, but the meanings are shown by the noun endings. Any order of the three words is grammatically correct, and the meaning is clear because of the declensions. However, the default order is subject-verb-object.

There are certain words that have no accent (enclitics) that must come in a fixed order. They are, in order,

1. question words (only li),
2. verbs: clitic forms of "to be" except je (sam, si, smo, ste, su, bih, bi, bismo, biste), and of "will" (ću, ćeš, će, ćemo, and će)
3. dative pronouns (mi, ti, mu, joj, nam, vam, im),
4. the reflexive accusative pronoun (only se), and the reflexive dative pronoun (only si)
5. accusative pronoun (me, te, ga, je, ju, nas, vas, and ih),
6. clitic form of the third person singular present of "to be" (je).

The enclitics must be at the second position of the sentence. The first element may be a single word or a premodifier-noun combination, e.g. Taj se čovjek vara, "That person deceives himself", or Taj čovjek se vara.

See also

• Croatian language
• Štokavian dialect
• Kajkavian dialect
• Chakavian dialect

External links

• Learn-Croatian.com — phrases and grammar
• Beginner's Croatian
• Croatian for travellers, with audio files

• Croatian language
• Grammars of specific languages