Questions & Answers about Roditelji ju vole.
- Roditelji = parents (nominative plural, subject)
- ju = her (unstressed object pronoun, accusative singular feminine)
- vole = (they) love (3rd person plural present of voljeti)
So the literal order is Parents her love, which in natural English is The parents love her.
Croatian has no articles like the or a/an.
- Roditelji can mean parents, the parents, or some parents, depending only on context.
- If you really want to specify those particular parents, you can add something like ti roditelji (those parents) or njeni roditelji (her parents), but there is still no separate word that always equals English the.
- ju is a direct object pronoun, 3rd person singular, feminine, in the accusative case.
- It usually translates as her, and sometimes as it if it refers to a feminine noun (like kuća – house).
- In this sentence, ju is the thing/person being loved: The parents love her.
All three are forms of ona (she):
- je – short, unstressed object form (accusative): Vidim je. = I see her.
- ju – another short, unstressed form, very common in Croatian: Vidim ju. = I see her.
- nju – full, stressed form, used for emphasis or after prepositions:
- Vidim nju, ne njega. = I see her, not him.
- Za nju je to važno. = For her, that is important.
In many everyday sentences, je and ju are both possible, and you can think of them as near‑synonyms for her/it in object position.
Short pronouns like ju are clitics, and Croatian clitics normally want to stand in second position in the clause.
- In a simple sentence, that usually means right after the first stressed word:
- Roditelji ju vole. ✔
- Roditelji vole ju. sounds unnatural in standard Croatian; with a pronoun it should be Roditelji ju vole.
So the position of ju is mainly controlled by the clitic word-order rule, not by the English pattern.
Yes, but the nuance is different:
- Roditelji ju vole. – neutral: The parents love her.
- Roditelji vole nju. – emphasizes nju (her in particular):
- Like: It’s her that the parents love (not someone else).
In Roditelji vole nju, nju is stressed and not a clitic, so it can stand at the end. With the unstressed ju, the clitic rule forces Roditelji ju vole.
From case and verb agreement, not from position:
- Roditelji is in the nominative plural, which is the typical subject form.
- The verb vole is 3rd person plural, agreeing in number/person with Roditelji.
- ju is in the accusative, the typical direct object case.
Even if you changed the word order (e.g. Vole je roditelji.), the grammar roles would stay the same because of these endings and forms.
The infinitive is voljeti (to love). In the present tense it conjugates (singular–plural):
- ja volim – I love
- ti voliš – you love (sg)
- on/ona/ono voli – he/she/it loves
- mi volimo – we love
- vi volite – you love (pl/formal)
- oni/one/ona vole – they love
So vole is 3rd person plural: oni/one vole = they love. The -jeti infinitive stem loses -je- in the present (a common pattern: letjeti → leti, misljeti → misli, etc.).
Yes. ju refers to any feminine singular noun in the accusative, not only a female person. For example:
- Kupili su kuću. Roditelji ju vole.
= They bought a house. The parents love it.
So without context, ju can mean either her or it (feminine).
Yes, word order is flexible, but it affects emphasis:
- Roditelji ju vole. – neutral, simple statement.
- Vole ju roditelji. – fronting the verb; often used when continuing a topic or contrasting with someone else:
- It’s the parents who love her (maybe others don’t).
The clitic ju still appears in the second position of the clause:
- Vole ju roditelji. ✔
- Vole roditelji ju. ✖ (ungrammatical with clitic ju)
Use other short object pronouns in place of ju:
- Roditelji me vole. – The parents love me.
- Roditelji te vole. – The parents love you (sg).
- Roditelji ga vole. – The parents love him/it (masc).
- Roditelji je / ju vole. – The parents love her/it (fem).
- Roditelji nas vole. – The parents love us.
- Roditelji vas vole. – The parents love you (pl/formal).
- Roditelji ih vole. – The parents love them.
All these pronouns are clitics and follow the same second-position rule.
You add a possessive adjective for her to roditelji:
- Njezini roditelji ju vole. = Her parents love her.
Notes:
- njezini agrees with roditelji (masc. plural).
- In everyday speech you will also hear Njeni roditelji ju vole., which is very common, though school grammar usually teaches njezini as the standard form.