Declension of irregular kinship nouns (kći, mati)

Irregular Kinship Nouns: mati and kći

In Croatian, the feminine nouns for "mother" (mati) and "daughter" (kći) follow a highly irregular declension pattern. When they act as the subject of a sentence (nominative case), they are used exactly as they appear in their base forms.

When exploring ancestry, you will also frequently encounter vocabulary related to family history, such as podrijetlo (origin), korijen (root), and loza (lineage).

The Expanded Stems: mater- and kćer-

When mati and kći change cases to show their grammatical role in a sentence, their stems expand. Mati changes to the stem mater-, and kći changes to the stem kćer-.

(Note: In modern everyday Croatian, *majka is much more commonly used for "mother", but mati is still widely understood, deeply rooted in the language, and frequently found in historical or literary contexts.)*

Here is how they decline in the singular:

Notice how endings are added directly to these new stems. For example, in the Dative case (used for direction, recipients, or expressing similarity), they take the ending -i.

In the Accusative case (used for direct objects), they take no additional vowel ending at all, meaning they appear exactly as their expanded stems: mater and kćer.

For the Instrumental case (often used with the preposition s/sa meaning "with"), mati takes a standard feminine ending to become materom. However, kći takes a special feminine consonant-stem ending -ju, becoming kćerju.

Finally, when used after prepositions that require the Locative case (such as o, meaning "about"), they again take the ending -i, making their Locative forms identical to their Dative forms.