page_title: Serbo-Croatian grammar
section_title: Mood
hierarchical_section_title: Serbo-Croatian grammar / Morphology / Verbs / Mood
caption_attribution_description: English: Book cover of Snježana Kordić's Serbo-Croatian 2nd pub. 2006
context_page_description: Serbo-Croatian is a South Slavic language that has, like most other Slavic languages, an extensive system of inflection. "An examination of all the major 'levels' of language shows that BCS is clearly a single language with a single grammatical system."
  A taxonomic qualification is required to understand why this language remains referred to in its dialect form of Slavic as "Shtokavian." The grammar emerges from morphological changes from its parent language. The host of ethnonims applied such as "Bosnian" and "Montenegrin" rises from socio-civic political constructs from very recent periods, while the dialect develops prior to the existing ethnic and national identities. While normally the dialect would assume the name of the civic or state entity in which it happens, Shtokavian develops cross-tribally, predicating its use as the preferred choice for linguistic discussion.
  Pronouns, nouns, adjectives and some numerals decline whereas verbs conjugate for person and tense.
context_section_description: Besides the indicative, Serbo-Croatian uses the imperative, conditional, and the optative. Imperative forms vary according to the type of the verb, and is formed by adding the appropriate morpheme to a verbal stem. The conditional I (present) uses the aorist of biti plus perfect participle, while conditional II (past) consists of the perfect participle of biti, the aorist of the same verb, and the perfect participle of the main verb. Some grammars classify future II as a conditional tense, or even a mood of its own.
  Optative is in its form identical to the perfect participle. It is used by speakers to express a strong wish, e.g. Živio predsjednik! 'Long live the president!', Dabogda ti se sjeme zatrlo! (an archaic and dialectal curse), etc. The optative may be translated into English by an imperative construction, with set phrases (such as the already exemplified 'long live'), or by use of the modal verb may.
  Some authors suggest existence of subjunctive mood, realized as da plus the present of indicative, but most grammars treat it as present indicative.
caption: Book cover of Snježana Kordić’s Grammar book Serbo-Croatian 1st pub. 1997, 2nd pub. 2006 (Contents)
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