Pitanja
Overview
Ask yes/no questions with да ли + statement order or put the verb first and follow it with ли.
In open questions (who, what, where…) the question word usually comes first in the clause, most often followed straight away by the verb: Где живиш? If it modifies a noun, the noun follows it directly: Која књига је твоја?
Yes/No questions: да ли and ли-inversion
Да ли is the safest way to ask a yes/no question: place it first, then keep the statement's normal word order unchanged. Да ли говориш српски? (Do you speak Serbian?) is literally Да ли + Говориш српски.
The alternative is ли-inversion: move the verb to the front and attach ли directly after it, in second position, like any other enclitic. Говориш ли српски? asks the same thing. With бити, the long form combines with ли: Јеси ли уморан? (Are you tired?) - see the lesson on the verb бити.
In a yes/no question, ли can never stand at the very start of a sentence, and can never attach to a noun or pronoun directly - it leans on the conjugated verb leading the clause.
Question words
The core set: ко (who), шта (what), где (where), кад(а) (when), како (how), зашто (why), колико (how much/how many) - see the table below for examples. Each of them usually starts the clause, and the verb most often follows right after.
Two question words also agree with the noun they modify: који/која/које (which) and чији/чија/чије (whose) change ending to match the noun's gender and number - see the table below for који/која/које in each gender.
Ко takes masculine singular agreement even when asking who came: Ко је дошао? To ask which woman from a known group came, use Која је дошла?
Answering
Answer a yes/no question with Да. (Yes) or Не. (No), optionally followed by a full sentence. A one-word affirmative echo of бити uses the long form: Јеси ли студент? - Јесам. (Are you a student? - I am.) - see the lesson on the verb бити.
Open questions are answered by giving exactly the information the question word asked for, usually without repeating it: Где живиш? - У Београду. (Where do you live? - In Belgrade.)
Tables
| Word | Example |
|---|---|
| ko | Ko je to? |
| šta | Šta radiš? |
| gde | Gde živiš? |
| kad(a) | Kad dolaziš? |
| kako | Kako si? |
| zašto | Zašto plačeš? |
| koliko | Koliko košta? |
Examples
Compared with…
English builds yes/no questions with the auxiliary do (Do you speak…?) or by inverting to be/modal verbs (Are you…?, Can you…?). Serbian needs neither: no auxiliary verb exists, and the question is built purely with да ли or the ли particle attached to the main verb itself.
Common mistakes
Tips & exceptions
- When unsure, default to да ли + normal word order - it always works and never sounds wrong, unlike some casual shortcuts of ли-inversion.
- Ли behaves exactly like the short forms of бити you already know: unstressed, never sentence-initial, always leaning on the word before it.
- Learn који/која/које together with the noun-gender lesson - the ending you pick simply mirrors the noun's gender.
- In fast colloquial speech да ли is sometimes shortened to је ли regardless of the main verb („Је ли долазиш?“) - informal and not used in writing.
- Шта and ко never change form for gender or number, unlike који/која/које - they stay invariant no matter what they refer to.