Personal pronouns in the nominative

You cannot say speak Serbian on its own — you have to say I speak Serbian, she speaks Serbian. That little word at the front is what tells you who is doing it. Serbian puts the same information somewhere else: in the ending of the verb.

Look at govorim srpski ("I speak Serbian") and govorimo srpski ("we speak Serbian"). Nobody said "I" or "we". The ending -m means the speaker, the ending -mo means a group including the speaker. Because the ending already says it, Serbian normally leaves the pronoun out altogether.

The ten pronouns

Serbian still has the words, and you need to recognise all of them. Here they are in the form used for the subject of a sentence.

The third person follows the gender of the noun, not whether it is alive. Every Serbian noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, and the pronoun that replaces it copies that gender. Dete ("child") is neuter, so a child is ono — even when you know perfectly well the child is a boy or a girl.

Ona appears twice: it is "she" and it is also "they" for neuter nouns. The verb settles it. Ona govori has a singular ending, so it is "she speaks". Ona govore has a plural ending, so it is "they speak" — about deca, for example.

Oni and one are one letter apart and mean different groups. Marko and Milan are oni. Ana and Sofija are one. Marko and Ana together are oni — one man in the group is enough.

Why you usually leave the pronoun out

A plain statement takes no pronoun. "My name is Ana" is simply Zovem se Ana, and "Do you understand?" is simply Razumeš? Putting ja or ti in front of every verb is not a small stylistic slip — it sounds like you are insisting, the way "I speak Serbian" sounds if you hit the I hard every single time.

You do say the pronoun in three situations.

1. Contrast — two people, doing different things: Ja govorim srpski, a ona govori engleski.
2. Emphasis — pointing at one person out of several: On ne razume engleski.
3. On its own, with no verb after it, usually answering a question: Ko govori srpski? — Ja.

Ti or vi?

Ti is for one person you are close to: a friend, a classmate, a child, someone in your family. Vi is for more than one person — and also for one person you are being polite to: a stranger, a shop assistant, an older person, anyone at work. With that polite vi, the verb stays plural too: you ask a stranger Kako se zovete?, never Kako se zoveš?

When you write the polite vi to one person, Serbian often capitalises it: Vi. Nothing changes in speech. If you are unsure which to use with an adult you have just met, use vi — starting with ti sounds pushy, and the other person can always invite you to switch.