The Case Ending Map

This is the page you will come back to for months. It puts every noun case ending — all seven cases, singular and plural, across the four main declension types — into a single scannable map. Do not try to memorise it cell by cell. The whole point of this page is the opposite: to show you the symmetries that let you store a few patterns instead of dozens of separate endings. The biggest of those symmetries is that the entire plural is far easier than the singular, and we will say so up front so you can relax about the bottom half of the chart.

The four declension types

Croatian nouns sort into four ending-patterns. Three of them line up with the three genders; the fourth is a second feminine pattern:

• Masculine — e.g. grad ("city"), prijatelj ("friend"). Ends in a consonant.
• Neuter — e.g. selo ("village"), more ("sea"). Ends in -o or -e.
• Feminine -a — e.g. žena ("woman"), knjiga ("book"). Ends in -a. By far the largest class.
• Feminine -i — e.g. noć ("night"), stvar ("thing"). Ends in a consonant but is feminine; declines on -i.

The first thing to know about a noun is which of these four boxes it falls in, because that determines its whole paradigm. The genders are explained on the gender overview and the individual paradigm pages; this page assumes you can already sort a noun and want the endings at a glance.

The singular map

Where two endings appear (e.g. -e / -u for the masculine vocative), the choice is hard stem vs soft stem: hard stems (ending in a non-palatal consonant) take the first option, soft stems (ending in a palatal: č, ć, đ, dž, š, ž, j, lj, nj, c) take the second. So grad → grade (hard vocative) but prijatelj → prijatelju (soft vocative); grad → gradom (hard instrumental) but prijatelj → prijateljem (soft instrumental).

The plural map — notice how it collapses

The high-value syncretisms (read this, save hours)

A syncretism is two cells that share one ending. Croatian is generous with them, and each one is a case you do not have to learn separately. Lock these in:

1. Dativ = Lokativ, everywhere. In every gender, singular and plural, the dative and locative are identical (gradu = gradu, gradovima = gradovima, ženi = ženi, noći = noći). You will never need a separate locative ending. The only thing that distinguishes them in use is that the lokativ always follows a preposition and the dativ usually does not.

2. Accusative inanimate = Nominative. For neuter nouns always, and for inanimate masculine nouns, the accusative copies the nominative (selo → selo, grad → grad). Only animate masculine nouns have a distinct accusative, borrowed from the genitive (prijatelj → prijatelja).

3. Vocative = Nominative for neuters and the plural. Neuter nouns never have a special vocative (selo! = selo). And in the plural, the vocative always equals the nominative for every gender. So the vokativ as a distinct form lives only in the masculine and feminine singular.

4. The feminine -i singular is almost all -i. Four of its seven cases (gen, dat, vok, lok) are simply noći, and the accusative equals the nominative (noć). You are really learning two shapes: noć and noći.

The genitive plural: the one irregular hotspot

If the plural is otherwise a gift, the genitive plural is where it asks something back. It is the one plural cell that is not predictable from a single ending:

Two complications cluster here. First, the feminine -a genitive plural often inserts a fleeting -a- to break an awkward consonant cluster: sestra → sestara, djevojka → djevojaka, pismo (neuter) → pisama. Second, a small set of high-frequency nouns keeps an old -iju / -u form: ruka → ruku ("of hands"), noga → nogu, oko → očiju ("of eyes"), uho → ušiju ("of ears"), kost → kostiju. These are worth memorising one by one because they are extremely common. The full treatment is on the genitive plural page.

Where endings look identical (so you are not surprised)

Several cells in the maps above are spelled the same as their neighbours, and it can feel like the system has "lost" a case. It hasn't — Croatian simply lets context disambiguate. The honest list of look-alikes:

• Masculine/neuter dativ = lokativ singular (gradu, selu) — tell them apart by the preposition.
• Feminine -a dativ = lokativ singular (ženi) — same.
• Neuter genitiv singular = nominative/accusative plural (sela = "of the village" or "the villages"). The number and any preposition decide.
• Feminine -i: gen sg = dat sg = lok sg = voc sg = nom pl = acc pl = voc pl = gen pl, all noći. Astonishingly, eight of this declension's cells share the form noći. Context carries the entire load.

How this differs from English

English has, in effect, a "case map" with exactly two columns: the plain form (city) and the possessive city's / cities'. Everything else — to, of, with, in, the subject/object distinction — is handled outside the noun, by word order and prepositions. Croatian folds all of that into the noun, which is why one English entry (city) corresponds to up to ten distinct Croatian forms. The compensating mercy, which English does not offer, is the network of syncretisms: Croatian recycles the same ending across several cases, so the true number of shapes you must learn is far smaller than the grid suggests. Approach the map as a set of overlapping patterns, not as 56 independent facts.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Sort each noun into one of four declension types (masculine, neuter, feminine -a, feminine -i); the type fixes the whole paradigm.
• The singular is the hard part; the plural collapses — dat/lok/instr plural are all -ima (or -ama for feminine -a).
• Memorise the syncretisms: dativ = lokativ always, accusative inanimate = nominative, vocative = nominative for neuters and all plurals.
• The genitive plural is the one unpredictable cell (-a / -i / -iju, often with a fleeting vowel) — give it dedicated study.
• Many cells share spellings; context and prepositions, not the ending alone, tell them apart.