When describing a harsh, unforgiving environment, you often need to express how rare or limited something is. To do this, Croatian uses the restrictive indefinite pronouns malo tko and malo što.
Hardly anyone: Malo tko
To say that "hardly anyone" or "very few people" do something, combine malo (a little) with the question word tko (who). Because the pronoun is based on tko, the verb that follows it will always be conjugated in the singular.
| Hardly anyone lives on this desolate and harsh island. | Malo tko živi na ovom pustom i surovom otoku. |
| Hardly anyone thinks about survival in this unforgiving environment. | Malo tko razmišlja o preživljavanju u ovom nemilosrdnom okruženju. |
Hardly anything: Malo što
Similarly, to say "hardly anything" or "very few things", combine malo with što (what). Just like tko, što is grammatically singular and takes a singular verb.
| Because of the scarce resources, hardly anything grows here. | Zbog oskudnih resursa ovdje malo što raste. |
| Hardly anything withstands the scorching heat, but the stone remains. | Malo što odolijeva žegi, ali kamen ostaje. |
Describing extreme scarcity
These restrictive pronouns are highly effective for emphasizing the severity of extreme conditions. You will frequently see them paired with vocabulary related to survival and withstanding the elements, illustrating just how difficult it is to endure nature's extremes.
| Without water, hardly anyone withstands the scorching heat. | Bez vode malo tko odolijeva žegi. |
| Hardly anything helps survival like water. | Malo što pomaže preživljavanju kao voda. |