Род именица
Overview
Every Serbian noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, regardless of what it names: сто (table), кућа (house), село (village).
Gender decides the pronoun that replaces the noun (он / она / оно) and the ending an agreeing adjective takes - later lessons add case endings and past-tense agreement, which also depend on it, so it pays off to learn it correctly from the start.
Guessing gender from the ending
For most nouns, the nominative-singular ending predicts the gender: a noun ending in a consonant is normally masculine (брат, град); a noun ending in -а is normally feminine (жена, кућа, школа); a noun ending in -о or -е is normally neuter (село, поље, име).
This ending-based rule is a strong first guess for any new noun - trust it while learning the exception classes below.
Gender drives agreement
Adjectives change ending to match the noun's gender - велик (big) for masculine, велика for feminine, велико for neuter - the same pattern reappears with past-tense verbs in a later lesson.
Serbian also uses он/она/оно for inanimate objects, not just people - a table is он, a house is она, a village is оно.
The two exception classes
A lexical class of nouns for male people ends in -a but stays grammatically masculine. Frequent examples are тата (dad), деда (grandpa), судија (judge); the list is not complete, so check the gender of a new word in a dictionary. These nouns decline like feminine -a nouns but take masculine agreement: мој тата, not моја тата. Unlike тата and деда, which name only men, судија is an occupational noun - its agreement can follow the real judge's sex, defaulting to masculine only when unspecified.
A second lexical class of feminine nouns ends in a consonant instead of -а - most productively, virtually every abstract noun in -ост (младост, радост, могућност), plus a number of frequent concrete nouns like ноћ, реч, крв. Worth memorising as a class, since the consonant ending alone would otherwise suggest masculine; the examples do not exhaust it, so check the gender of a new word in a dictionary.
Tables
| Ending | Gender | Example |
|---|---|---|
| consonant | masculine | брат |
| -а | feminine | жена |
| -о | neuter | село |
| -е | neuter | поље |
| consonant (exception) | feminine | ноћ |
| -а (exception, male person) | masculine | тата |
Examples
Compared with…
English nouns have no grammatical gender - every inanimate object is it. Serbian assigns a gender to every noun, driving the pronoun and every later adjective and verb ending that agrees with it - gender can never be skipped or defaulted to a neutral it.
Common mistakes
Tips & exceptions
- Learn a noun's gender together with the word itself - think кућа (ж), not just кућа.
- Trust the ending-based rule as your default guess for a new noun's gender, but watch for the consonant-feminine nouns (especially the whole -ост class) and the masculine -a nouns for male people - the two exception classes worth memorising on their own.
- Gender decides the pronoun (он/она/оно) and every later adjective and verb ending that agrees with the noun, so it is worth confirming for every new noun you learn.
- A lexical class of masculine nouns for male people ends in -a and declines like a feminine noun while keeping masculine agreement: тата (dad), деда (grandpa), судија (judge) - though судија, unlike тата and деда, is an occupational noun whose agreement can follow the real judge's sex. The list is not complete: check the gender of a new word in a dictionary.
- A lexical class of feminine nouns ends in a consonant instead of -а - most productively, virtually all abstract nouns in -ост (младост, радост, могућност), plus some frequent concrete nouns like ноћ, реч, крв; the examples do not exhaust the class, so check the gender of a new word in a dictionary.
- Дете (child) is neuter, but its plural деца is grammatically a feminine singular collective noun - it takes plural agreement despite its singular-looking declension: Деца су лепа, not Деца је лепа. This is covered in more depth in a later lesson.