Adjective agreement in the nominative and accusative plural

You can already make an adjective agree with a singular noun in the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative-locative and instrumental, and you know how nouns form their nominative and accusative plurals. This lesson joins the two: what the adjective does when the noun is plural and is either the subject (the big dogs are sleeping) or the direct object (I see the big dogs). The good news is that the adjective simply borrows the plural noun endings you already know.

Plural subject: the nominative

These are the same endings the nouns take: psi ends in -i, mačke in -e, jaja in -a, and the adjective in front of each echoes it. The same forms are used after su to describe the subject: Psi su gladni. Ovce su mirne. Mačke su umorne. Jaja su sveža.

Plural object: the accusative

Read the two tables side by side and you will see that feminine and neuter do not change at all between subject and object. Only the masculine moves: -i as the subject, -e as the object. And unlike the singular, it makes no difference whether the masculine noun is alive: velike pse (dogs) and velike stolove (tables) take the same -e. That is exactly what happened to the nouns in the accusative plural, so the adjective and the noun stay in step.

The commonest slip is to copy the subject form onto the object: Volim veliki psi is wrong. When the group is the object, both the adjective and the noun take -e: Volim velike pse. If you find yourself writing -i in front of a noun that ends in -e, stop and change it.

Watch the stem

Adjectives whose masculine singular ends in -an or -ar after another consonant drop that a before every plural ending: gladan → gladni, gladne, gladna; dobar → dobri, dobre, dobra; miran → mirni, mirne, mirna; umoran → umorni; pametan → pametni. Two very common adjectives change even more: beo (white) becomes beli, bele, bela, and zao (mean, evil) becomes zli, zle, zla. You met this vanishing a in the feminine and neuter singular (gladna, gladno), and it vanishes in the plural in the same way.

Do not build the plural by adding -i to the form you hear in the masculine singular. Take the plural from the dictionary form of the adjective: the forms in this lesson's sentences are the ones to copy.

Mixed groups

When the plural stands for a mixed group of males and females — people or animals — the masculine -i wins: Marko i Ana su umorni. Pas i mačka su gladni. Only a group made entirely of feminine nouns takes -e.