Gender and plural in Croatian

In Croatian there are 7 cases and 3 genders that are used to form a noun ( imenica ). Also we distinguish masculine and feminine form. Regarding these three characteristics, only genders are invariable, while cases and numerals change depending on the word they are referring to. 

Croatian genders

There are three genders in Croatian language:

• ženski rod (feminine gender)
• muški rod (masculine gender)
• srednji rod (neuter gender)

As Croatian language doesn't have articles in front of the nouns, it is harder to remember the genders of the words. In general always the starting point in declination of nouns is a case in Nominative. Try to remember the endings of nouns!

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Masculine gender

Masculine gender are the nouns with ending in an consonant. 

Attention!

Exception are some nouns in -a, as for example "vođa, vojvoda".

Feminine gender

Feminine gender are the nouns with ending in -a. 

Neuter gender

Neuter gender are the nouns with ending in -o and -e.

Examples of all groups:

Moj grad je velik. = My city is big.

Selo se nalazi 40 kilometara od autoceste. = The village is situadet 40km far from the highway.

Hrvatska ima Jadransko more. = Croatia has Adriatic sea.

Njena majica je plave boje. = Her t-shirt is blue.

Singular and plural

As in many other languages, Croatian language has grammatical numbers as well. Those are singular and plural. Forming plural in the feminine and the neuter genders is very straightforward. 

Plural of feminine

The -a at the end of the word changes into -e:

Plural of neuter

The final -o or -e in the word is always changed into -a:

Plural of masculine

In most cases the plural is formed by adding an -i at the end:

Exceptions in pluralisation of masculine nouns

For masculine nouns with only one syllabe, we add the ending -ovi

For the word that end in an -k , the plural changes to -ci

Masculine nouns of one syllable which end with a palatal consonant (i.e. č, ć, đ, dž, š, ž, lj, nj, j) receive the ending -evi

Words which end in -ac, lose the final -a and receive the ending -ci

A few common words don’t follow any of these rules, which it's best just to learn by heart.

There are some nouns which don't change their form when in plural, in general they indicate only one object (for ex. it can be a body part, leđa = back), or other nouns like: hlače, ljestve, vijesti, vrata, novine, usta, pluća (pants, ladders, news, doors, newspapers, mouth, lungs). On the other side some non-count nouns have only plural form, as for example scissors (nožice).

Examples

Kupila sam dvoje hlače. - I bought two pants.

Njena kuća ima četvora vrata. - Her kouse has a four doors.

Dnevno čitam troje novine. - I read three newspapers daily.

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