Adjectives in Croatian

Just as with nouns, adjectives change their forms according to the three grammatical categories gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), number (singular or plural) and case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, instrumental).

1. Gender

Adjectives can be either masculine (lijep - beautiful), feminine (lijepa) or neuter (lijepo) – in accordance with the noun gender.

The masculine singular form is the basic form of the adjective and it ends with a consonant. All other forms – both singular and plural – are created by adding certain endings to this basic form.

To form feminine adjectives, an ending -a is added and an -o is added to make neuter adjectives.

You might come across masculine adjectives ending in -i (lijepi) in the nominative singular. The difference between the two (lijep vs. lijepi) is that the first one is indefinite, while the second one is definite. This would be equivalent to the English articles (a vs. the):

lijep prozor → a beautiful window
lijepi prozor → the beautiful window

However, since Croatian has no articles, this difference is of no greater importance, especially not to those who learn Croatian as the second language!

Even though most masculine adjectives (like masculine nouns) end in a consonant, there is also a relatively small group of masculine endings that end in two vowels: either -ao or -eo. With these adjectives, an “-l” needs to be inserted before the usual endings:

debeo (fat) → debela → debelo
topao (warm) → topla → toplo
okrugao (round) → okrugla → okruglo

2. Number

Adjectives have a singular and a plural form. Both forms also have genders. Plural endings of the adjectives in nominative are exactly the same as the noun endings (unless the noun is irregular):

3. Case

There are seven cases in Croatian. Unfortunately, the adjective ending doesn’t also match the noun ending, so these endings need to be learnt by heart.

*This change only applies to masculine nouns and adjectives which denote living beings (i.e. people and animals). These nouns receive the ending -a and adjectives receive the ending -og in the accusative case.