Dialogue: Talking About Family

Few topics come up faster in real conversation than family, and few short exchanges pack as much grammar as introducing your relatives. This page takes a tiny, completely natural family dialogue and pulls it apart sentence by sentence, so that by the end you can not only say who your relatives are but understand why Czech chooses the possessive forms it does. The star of the show is the reflexive possessive svůj, a distinction English simply does not have.

The dialogue

— To je moje sestra a její manžel. — Aha. A kde bydlí? — Bydlí u svých rodičů na vesnici. A kde bydlí tvoji rodiče? — Moji bydlí kousek od nás, v bytě babičky a dědy.

Translation:

— This is my sister and her husband. — I see. And where do they live? — They live at their own parents' place in the countryside. And where do your parents live? — Mine live near us, in my grandparents' flat.

This is exactly how two people might talk while looking at photos on a phone. Everything here is everyday spoken register. Let's annotate it.

"To je moje sestra" — the presentational to

Czech introduces and points things out with to je ("this is / that is / these are"), and to stays fixed no matter the gender or number of what follows. You do not say ten je for a masculine person or ta je for a feminine one when you are simply presenting.

Notice that with a plural the verb agrees (to jsou, "these are"), but to itself does not change.

moje sestra — the possessive agrees

Sestra ("sister") is a feminine noun, so the possessive takes its feminine nominative form moje (the longer, fully colloquial-and-standard variant; má is the shorter, more formal-literary alternative). The possessive must agree with the thing possessed, not with the speaker.

Here můj bratr and můj táta use the masculine form můj, while moje serves the feminine and (in its plural use) the rest. For the full paradigm see the declension of můj and tvůj.

"její manžel" — jeho and její never change for their noun

When the owner is a third person, English has his, her, its, their. Czech has jeho (his/its), její (her), and jejich (their). The crucial fact: jeho and jejich are completely indeclinable, and její declines only lightly. In our line, její manžel means "her husband" — the její points back to the sister.

Compare the two owners carefully: její manžel = the husband of her (the sister); jeho žena = the wife of him. The Czech choice depends entirely on the sex of the owner, exactly as English her/his does, so this part feels familiar. See the indeclinable possessives jeho / její / jejich for the details.

"tvoji rodiče" — a masculine-animate plural possessive

Rodiče ("parents") is grammatically a masculine animate plural noun. That animacy is why the possessive is tvoji ("your", informal) and not tvoje. The nominative plural of masculine animate nouns and their modifiers takes a distinct ending — tvoji rodiče, moji rodiče, naši rodiče — the same ending you see in ti dva muži ("those two men").

In relaxed everyday speech (obecná čeština) you will very often hear tvoje rodiče and moje rodiče instead — the colloquial variant flattens the animate ending. Both are common; tvoji / moji is the careful standard.

"bydlí" — the verb of residing

Bydlet ("to live, to reside") is the verb for where you make your home, as opposed to žít ("to live" in the sense of being alive or living a certain kind of life). It is imperfective only — there is no perfective partner, because residing is a continuous state rather than a one-off completed act. The third-person form, singular or plural, is bydlí.

For its full conjugation and the contrast with žít, see the verb bydlet.

"u svých rodičů" — the heart of the lesson

Now the key construction. Bydlí u svých rodičů means "they live at their (own) parents' place." Two things are happening at once.

u + genitive = "at someone's place"

The preposition u governs the genitive and means "at the place of, at someone's, with" (like French chez or German bei). U lékaře = "at the doctor's"; u nás = "at our place." So u rodičů = "at the parents' (place)." The noun rodiče shifts from nominative rodiče to genitive rodičů.

For more of this spatial u, see genitive prepositions of place.

svých — the reflexive possessive

Why svých rodičů and not jejích rodičů? Because the owner of the parents is the subject of the clause. The subject is "they" (the sister and her husband), and the people they live with are their own parents. When the possessor is the subject, Czech does not use jeho / její / jejich — it must use the reflexive possessive svůj (here in genitive plural, svých).

Now watch what changes if we swap svých for jejích:

With jejích, the parents belong to someone other than the subject — a third woman mentioned elsewhere. This is the contrast English cannot make in a single word: English "their parents" is ambiguous, but Czech forces you to choose between svých (the subject's own) and jejich (somebody else's).

For the complete picture of the reflexive possessive, see the svůj overview.

"v bytě babičky a dědy" — genitive of possession

In the last line the other speaker says v bytě babičky a dědy — "in grandma and grandpa's flat." Here is the plain genitive of possession: the owners, babička and děda, go into the genitive (babičky, dědy) and follow the head noun byt ("flat"). Czech expresses "X of Y" by putting Y in the genitive and usually placing it after the head noun: byt (head) + babičky a dědy (genitive, "of grandma and grandpa").

Notice that mého muže itself shows possessive můj in the genitive singular masculine animate form mého, agreeing with muže ("husband", genitive of muž). For the mechanics of this construction see the genitive of possession.

Core family vocabulary in this dialogue

Common mistakes

These are the errors English speakers make again and again with this kind of sentence.

The owner (they) is the subject, so the reflexive svých is obligatory; jejich would point to someone else.

Manžel is masculine, so even though the owner is female, the form is její agreeing with the masculine noun; the second clause above forces the wrong, dangling possessive.

After u the plural rodiče must go into the genitive plural rodičů, not stay in the nominative.

For the careful standard, the masculine-animate plural takes tvoji; tvoje is acceptable only as the colloquial variant.

Bratr is masculine, so the possessive is můj, not moje.

Key takeaways