Serbo-Croatian grammar

Serbo-Croatian is a South Slavic language that has, like most other Slavic languages, an extensive system of inflection. This article describes exclusively the grammar of the Shtokavian dialect, which is a part of the South Slavic dialect continuum and the basis for the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian standard variants of Serbo-Croatian.Pronouns, nouns, adjectives, and some numerals decline (change the word ending to reflect case, i.e. grammatical category and function), whereas verbs conjugate for person and tense. As in all other Slavic languages, the basic word order is subject–verb–object (SVO); however, due to the use of declension to show sentence structure, word order is not as important as in languages that tend toward analyticity such as English or Chinese. Deviations from the standard SVO order are stylistically marked and may be employed to convey a particular emphasis, mood or overall tone, according to the intentions of the speaker or writer. Often, such deviations will sound literary, poetical, or archaic.Nouns have three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, that correspond to a certain extent with the word ending, so that most nouns ending in -a are feminine, -o and -e neuter, and the rest mostly masculine with a small but important class of feminines. The grammatical gender of a noun affects the morphology of other parts of speech (adjectives, pronouns, and verbs) attached to it. Nouns are declined into seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental.Verbs are divided into two broad classes according to their aspect, which can be either perfective (signifying a completed action) or imperfective (action is incomplete or repetitive). There are seven tenses, four of which (present, perfect, future I and II) are used in contemporary Serbo-Croatian, and the other three (aorist, imperfect and plusquamperfect) used much less frequently—the plusquamperfect is generally limited to written language and some more educated speakers, whereas the aorist and imperfect are considered stylistically marked and rather archaic. However, some non-standard dialects make considerable (and thus unmarked) use of those tenses.All Serbo-Croatian lexemes in this article are spelled in accented form in Latin alphabet, as well as in both accents (Ijekavian and Ekavian, with Ijekavian bracketed) where these differ (see Serbo-Croatian phonology.)