Editing Serbian language (section)

== Grammar ==
[[File:Address_of_Serbian_President_Boris_Tadić_on_the_preliminary_results_of_the_Montenegrin_referendum_(2006).ogv|thumb|Address of the former Serbian President [[Boris Tadić]] (2006)]]
{{main|Serbo-Croatian grammar}}

Serbian is a highly [[fusional language|inflected language]], with grammatical morphology for nouns, pronouns and adjectives as well as verbs.<ref>{{cite book|first1=Celia|last1=Hawkworth|first2=Jelena|last2=Ćalić|title=Colloquial Serbian: The Complete Course for Beginners|publisher=Routledge|year=2006|isbn=9781138949799}}</ref>

=== Nouns ===
Serbian nouns are classified into three [[declension]]al types, denoted largely by their [[nominative case]] endings as "-a" type, "-i" and "-e" type. Into each of these declensional types may fall nouns of any of three [[grammatical gender|genders]]: masculine, feminine or neuter. Each noun may be inflected to represent the noun's [[grammatical case]], of which Serbian has seven:

* [[Nominative case|Nominative]]
* [[Genitive case|Genitive]]
* [[Dative case|Dative]]
* [[Accusative case|Accusative]]
* [[Vocative case|Vocative]]
* [[Instrumental case|Instrumental]]
* [[Locative case|Locative]]

Nouns are further inflected to represent the noun's [[grammatical number|number]], singular or plural.

=== Pronouns ===
Pronouns, when used, are inflected along the same case and number morphology as nouns. Serbian is a [[pro-drop language]], meaning that pronouns may be omitted from a sentence when their meaning is easily inferred from the text. In cases where pronouns may be dropped, they may also be used to add emphasis. For example:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Serbian !! English equivalent
|-
| ''Kako si?'' || How are you?
|-
| ''A kako si ti?'' || And how are ''you''?
|}

=== Adjectives ===
Adjectives in Serbian may be placed before or after the noun they modify, but must agree in number, gender and case with the modified noun.

===Verbs===
Serbian verbs are conjugated in four past forms—[[perfect (grammar)|perfect]], [[aorist]], [[imperfect]], and [[pluperfect]]—of which the last two have a very limited use (imperfect is still used in some dialects, but the majority of native Serbian speakers consider it archaic), one [[future tense]] (also known as the first future tense, as opposed to the second future tense or the future exact, which is considered a tense of the [[conditional mood]] by some contemporary linguists), and one [[present tense]]. These are the tenses of the [[indicative]] mood. Apart from the indicative mood, there is also the [[imperative mood]]. The conditional mood has two more tenses: the first conditional (commonly used in conditional clauses, both for possible and impossible conditional clauses) and the second conditional (without use in the spoken language—it should be used for impossible conditional clauses). Serbian has active and passive [[Voice (grammar)|voice]].

As for the non-finite verb forms, Serbian has one [[infinitive]], two [[adjectival participle]]s (the active and the passive), and two [[adverbial participle]]s (the present and the past).