Declension of surnames

At the Optometry Clinic

When checking in a patient (pacijent) at the optician's (optika), you will often need to look up their surname (prezime).

Declining Masculine Surnames

In Croatian, when a man's name changes case, both his first name and his surname must decline. The surname takes the standard endings for masculine nouns.

Notice how the surname "Horvat" mirrors the case endings of "Ivan" across different roles in the sentence, such as the accusative for a direct object, the instrumental for "with", and the genitive for "from".

Declining Feminine Surnames

Feminine surnames behave differently. While a woman's first name declines according to standard feminine rules, her surname never changes. It remains frozen in its nominative form regardless of the grammatical case.

Observe how "Ana" changes, but "Horvat" does not.

Putting It All Together

You must always pay attention to the patient's gender to know if their surname should decline.

Here are both rules side-by-side in the dative case, showing for whom the action is performed:

And again in the accusative case (following the preposition za):