10 Gender

→  You can also read this chapter in French, Spanish or Finnish.

In many languages, including Croatian, each noun is assigned a gender. This is a slightly misleading term – it simply means what forms of other words you must use whenever you refer to a noun.

For example, in English, when referring to a noun, you must use either he, she or it, depending on the noun, but there’s no difference for most other words.

In German, you must use not only different pronouns, but also different articles (der, die, das) and you have to adapt adjectives (kleiner, kleine, kleines) in some situations.

In Spanish, you have to use different pronouns, different articles (el, la) and different forms of adjectives (rojo, roja).

Since there are three different forms of pronouns in English, and three different forms of articles in German, we can say that English and German have three genders (in singular, there’s no difference in plural). There are two different forms of articles and adjectives in Spanish, therefore Spanish has two genders.

There are four genders in Croatian, but the difference between two of them is very small (and there’s no difference in plural). The gender in Croatian is similar to gender in Spanish: it’s usually assigned according to the last letter of a noun. For instance, kuća house is ‘feminine’ (since it ends in -a) in the same way as Spanish casa!

If you are familiar only with genders in English, this might be a bit surprising. Consider genders simply the way nouns are grouped. Houses are not feminine in real world. The gender that kuća house and sestra sister belong to is called ‘feminine’ simply because a lot of words for really feminine beings (e.g. for woman, sister, daughter) happen to belong to it.

It’s straightforward to tell gender of a noun for almost all nouns in Croatian. The rules are:

noun ends in	gender	some exceptions!
-a	feminine (f) e.g. riba fish	tata m Dad Luka m (name)
-o or -e	neuter (n) e.g. pivo beer	auto m car ® Marko m (name)
consonant	masculine (m) e.g. stol table ®	kost f bone noć f night

But there are four genders, right? Well, for masculine nouns there’s an additional division. It will be important a bit later.

(In case you’re surprised that one gender is called neuter – that’s a fairly standard name for a gender that’s neither male nor female.)

There are exceptions – e.g. names Luka and Marko look as if feminine and neuter; in fact, both are masculine, and frequent male names. All personal names (for people and animals) are either masculine or feminine (names ending in -o are typically masculine).

Another exception – the noun tata – is actually masculine, it means Dad.

It’s actually only important to remember (and indicate) gender for exceptional nouns, and there are only 50-100 such nouns used in everyday life. For example:

most bridge	—	masculine as expected, no need to indicate gender
kost f bone	—	feminine, contrary to the common rules, so we must indicate its gender (f)

The biggest group of nouns that have unexpected gender are feminine nouns not ending in -a. Almost all of them end in a consonant. Common ones are:

bol  ▶  f pain ® bolest  ▶  f disease jesen  ▶  f fall, autumn kost  ▶  f bone krv  ▶  f blood ljubav  ▶  f love

noć  ▶  f night obitelj  ▶  f (close) family ® ponoć  ▶  f midnight riječ  ▶  f word sol  ▶  f salt ® večer  ▶  f evening ®

To help you with nouns that have unexpected gender, they will be shown in dark blue, and you can get a pop-up with their gender by placing the mouse over them, or by touching them (on touchscreens), for example:

Vidim krv. I see blood.

Vozim auto. I’m driving a car.

Gender of words for people normally matches their natural sex (there are some exceptions, though). Consequently, many terms represented by only one noun in English have two nouns in Croatian: one for male and one for female (the same holds in Romance languages like French, Italian or Spanish):

	male	female
English	friend
French	ami	amie
Spanish	amigo	amiga
Croatian	prijatelj	prijateljica

In Croatian, main words that must adapt to noun gender are adjectives – words that indicate properties like big, red. In Croatian, adjectives also include words like my and Ivan’s. They all must adapt to noun gender and case.

So, what forms of adjectives do we need to use in each gender? In simple sentences like the house is big, nominative forms of adjectives are used, and they are very simple:

gender	adj. N	example
feminine	-a	velika riba big fish
neuter	-o (some -e)	veliko jezero big lake
masculine	optionally -i	velik(i) stol big table ®

You probably notice that there are two possible endings for the neuter gender. Most adjectives use -o; adjectives that need -e will be shown a bit later. Here’s a list of often used adjectives:

brz  ▶  fast čist  ▶  clean dug long gotov  ▶  ready, done jak strong jeftin cheap lijep nice, beautiful mali small, little mlad young nov new

poznat well-known pun full slab weak skup expensive slan salty spor slow star old suh dry ® velik big zdrav healthy, in good health

We can use them to assemble sentences like these:

Riba je velika.  ▶  The fish is big.

Velika riba jedejesti kruh.  ▶  The big fish is eating bread. ®

Sunce nije jako. The sun isn’t strong.

Ana je zdrava. Ana is healthy.

Restoran nije skup. The restaurant isn’t expensive.

You can see that adjectives got an -o regardless of nouns having the final -o or -e: it’s only gender that matters, and sunce is neuter.

In Croatian (like in other Slavic and Romance languages) adjectives always adapt to the noun, even if they are not right next to the noun. In German, adjectives in sentences like The fish is big, so-called predicates, don’t adapt. That’s one detail where Croatian requires words to change and German doesn’t.

This makes pronouns mostly redundant, and consequently not used, as in e.g. zdrava je she is healthy, where she is implied by the form of the adjective.

Of course, some adjectives have certain complications! There are four adjectives that end in -ok or -ek:

dalek far, distant dubok deep

širok wide visok high, tall

They behave in a special way ‒ only in the standard stress scheme: when used as predicates ‒ that is, when we say ‘X is (not) deep/wide’ ‒ they shift their stress in feminine and neuter genders to -ok or -ek:

Visok je. He’s tall.

Visokaʷ¹ je. She’s tall. (standard scheme: stress shift)

Jezero je dubokoʷ¹. The lake is deep. (standard scheme: stress shift)

This does not happen in the ‘western’ stress scheme, so I marked these words with superscript W1, meaning "stress on the first syllable in the ‘western’ scheme". I will not specially mark these adjectives, as adjectives that end in -ok or -ek behave like that.

Pay attention that in Croatian, kuća house and pizza are also she, so visokaʷ¹ je could be a statement about a house!

It’s possible to put the adjective first in sentences "X is Y", which emphasizes it:

Dubokoʷ¹ je jezero. The lake is deep. (really deep)

Neuter forms of adjectives are common in stand-alone signs. For example, you’ll often see neuter forms otvoreno and zatvoreno on shops, meaning open and closed, respectively.

One more detail is still not answered: adjectives have an optional -i in the masculine gender. It’s not used when you use adjectives on their own (i.e. as a predicate), but it’s usually used when an adjective is placed before a noun (i.e. as an attribute):

Hrast je star. The oak is old. (predicate)

Stari hrast još rasterasti. The old oak is still growing. (attribute)

We have here used the verb rasti (raste) grow; the verb is not used to grow something (i.e. cultivate).

Some adjectives (e.g. mali small, little) have always the -i in masculine, regardless where they’re used, and they’re listed so. Its feminine form is mala and so on.

The adjective gotov is used to express that something is prepared or ready, e.g.:

Ručak je gotov. The dinner is ready.

The adverbs of intensity are also used with adjectives, and must be placed right before them (or fused, in case of pre-):

Riba je jako velika. The fish is very big.

Jezero je dosta dubokoʷ¹. The lake is quite deep.

Restoran nije preskup. The restaurant isn’t too expensive.

Sunce je stvarno jako. The sun is really strong.

Vlak je strašno spor. The train is terribly slow. (colloq.)

The adverb of intensity jako is exactly the same as the neuter form of the adjective jak strong, but its meaning is not equal. More about that in the next chapter.

Don’t forget: nouns and adjectives really don’t have the same endings. And you should always keep in mind that there are couple of nouns having unexpected genders (from their endings, at least):

Tata je zdrav. Dad is healthy.

Noć je duga. The night is long.

________

® In southern parts of Croatia (i.e. in Dalmatia) and parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina, auto car is very often neuter in colloquial speech, so you’ll sometimes read and hear novo auto.

The noun stol table has the form sto (stol-) in Serbia and most of Bosnia, but it’s still masculine. Consequently, it’s velik(i) sto in Serbia.

The noun bol f pain is almost always masculine in Serbia, and is often understood as masculine in Bosnia as well.

Instead of obitelj, words familija and porodica are common in most of Bosnia and Serbia, and in some parts of Croatia.

The noun sol f salt has the form so (sol-) in Serbia and most of Bosnia; its gender and case endings are the same.

The noun večer f evening has the form veče (večer- f) in Serbia and often in Bosnia, with an additional twist: it’s considered neuter in the nominative case (since it ends in -e), and feminine whenever any ending is attached to it (as indicated by an f after its case-base)! It changes like other feminine nouns not ending in -a.

Instead of suh, suv is used in Serbia, and parts of Bosnia and Croatia (it’s non-standard in Croatia).

Instead of kruh, hljeb is used in most of Bosnia, and in the “Ekavian” form hleb in Serbia (often colloquially leb); the actual spread of various words for bread is not trivial, as you can see in the chapter 05 Accusative Case.

↓ Something Possibly Interesting (click to show)

Some people think everything in a language serves some purpose. There has to be some benefit from gender, from case marked by endings, and so on.

However, I don’t think so. There was maybe a purpose once for many features, but now we are just left with relics. For instance, why would the word noć night be feminine? We know it’s inherited from very ancient times, since many related languages have a similar word, and it’s usually feminine: German Nacht, Latin nox, Greek νύξ nýx, Albanian natë, Lithuanian naktis etc. Therefore, the matching word was almost certainly also feminine in the common ancestor of all these languages. But we have no idea why it was feminine at all. Many things in languages are just so, and we don’t know why.

In a case you will read a grammar published in Croatia, names of genders in Croatian are muški rod (masc.), ženski rod (fem.) and srednji rod (neut.); for some unknown reason, they are always listed in that order. Unfortunately, Croatian textbooks and grammars written for general population always mention only three genders...

It’s interesting that some Croatian style/grammar manuals (i.e. books and websites suggesting what is “correct”) suggest that bol, when meaning physical pain, must be masculine. This advice is ignored by virtually everyone, including government websites, textbooks, newspapers, scientific papers, etc. This is just in case you find such an advice somewhere: just ignore it.

A small remark: Croatian nouns ending in -a, regardless of gender, are also called a-nouns; feminine nouns not ending in -a are also called i-nouns.

↓ Examples (click to show)

This list of side dishes from a small restaurant in Zagreb contains a number of adjectives:

As you can see, all items are translated to English. Interesting ones are:

zelena salata literally means green salad – we don’t have a special noun for lettuce, this phrase is used instead. Since salata is feminine (it ends in -a) the adjective zelen green must go to the feminine form.

ljuta mljevena paprika – again, paprika is feminine by the usual rule, so both adjectives before it get an -a. It’s interesting that the adjective ljut means both angry and hot (spice). We don’t use words related to heat to describe how spicy something is!

svježi kupus is literally fresh cabbage; the adjective is usually used to distinguish it from the fermented cabbage, i.e. sauerkraut (kiseli kupus). The adjective svjež fresh here got at -i before a masculine noun, which is, strictly speaking, not mandatory, but extremely common.

kiseli krastavci is literally sour cucumbers, the noun is here in plural, which will be described later (however, this noun simply gets an -i, as the adjective before it).

urnebes (ljuti/blagi) is likely a specialty of the restaurant. The noun means roughy mayhem, pandemonium; the adjectives after it are still attached to the noun, so both – the second one means mild – get that -i. Although adjectives normally precede nouns, you will see them after nouns once a while, especially in menus.

ajvar is a condiment made of baked red peppers, common in Balkan cuisine. Also, kajmak is not simply cream, but something specific for Turkish-influenced regions, all the way to Central Asia and Mongolia (check the Wikipedia entry).

Another example is this sign on the door of a post office:

As explained above, such stand-alone use of adjectives always requires neuter gender; the post office is zatvoren closed here.

↓ Exercise (click to show)

Fill in the sentences below, using right forms of adjectives, and adverbs of intensity, where needed:

Show a pop-up Croatian keyboard

Soba je . The room is big.

Hotel je . The hotel is full.

Svjetlo je . The light is weak.

Restoran je . The restaurant is really expensive.

Knjiga je . The book is well-known.

Jezero je . The lake is deep.

Riječ je . The word is long.

Čaša je . The glass is full.

Plaža je . The beach is very nice.

Doručak je . The breakfast is ready.

Zima je . The winter is long.

Pivo je . The beer is cheap.

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