Imenica

Imenica is the term used in the grammar of several South Slavic languages, such as Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian, to denote a part of speech that names a person, a place, a thing, or an idea. It encompasses both common nouns, which name general items, and proper nouns, which designate specific entities like a person’s name or a city. Nouns are central to sentence meaning and typically function as subjects, direct objects, or dependents of other words.

In languages with noun declensions, imenice inflect for case and number and, in many cases, gender. Croatian and Serbian nouns have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and singular and plural forms; they decline across seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental. Adjectives and numerals agreeing with a noun must match its gender and number. In standard Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian, nouns usually do not carry a definite article; definiteness is expressed through demonstratives, word order, or context rather than a separate article.

Types of imenica include common nouns, which name general items (for example, kuća, "house"), and proper nouns, which name unique entities (for example, Beograd, "Belgrade"). Nouns can denote countable or mass concepts and often pair with determiners or numerals to express quantity. The etymology of the word traces to ime, meaning "name," with the suffix -nica forming a term for a category of words.

Overall, imenica functions as a foundational category in South Slavic grammar, defining how words refer to things in the world and how they interact with other parts of speech.