ustala

Ustala is a term that occurs in several South Slavic languages, most commonly as the feminine past participle form of the verb ustati, meaning to rise or to get up. In Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian, ustati forms a past tense with the auxiliary verb biti, and ustala specifically corresponds to “she rose” or “she stood up.” A typical sentence is Ona je ustala, meaning “She stood up” or “She has risen.”

As a participial form, ustala functions as part of a compound tense rather than as an independent finite verb. Its usage is routine in everyday speech to describe a completed action of rising, waking, or standing up, often translated into English simply as “rose” or “stood up” when the subject is feminine. The masculine counterpart is ustao, and other gendered forms exist for different subjects, reflecting standard inflection patterns of the verb ustati.

In addition to its grammatical role, ustala may appear in language-related discussions as an example of gender agreement in Slavic past tenses. It is not widely documented as a separate lexical item with a distinct meaning beyond the verb’s participial form. In some contexts, ustala could also surface in regional dialects or as part of proper names and toponyms, but such uses are not prominent in standard reference works and are highly dependent on local naming traditions.