My English students spend years agonising over “a” versus “the”. When they start Montenegrin, I get to give them a rare piece of good news on day one: we don't have either word. None. Kafa is coffee, a coffee, or the coffee — you decide from the situation, not from a little word stuck in front. It's one of the genuinely simpler corners of a language people assume is all pain.
Published 25 May 2026
I'm Maja, I teach this for a living, and I've watched hundreds of English speakers brace themselves for Serbian and Montenegrin grammar. So let me hand you the freebie before we get to the cases: there are no articles. Not "difficult articles". Not "articles with exceptions". They simply do not exist in the language, the same as in Latin, Russian, or Japanese. Whole category, gone.
Think about how much invisible work "a" and "the" do in English, and how impossible they are to explain. Why "I play the piano" but "I play Ø football"? Why "she's in hospital" in Britain but "in the hospital" in America? Learners of English lose their minds over this, and there's no clean rule — you just absorb it over years.
In Montenegrin you skip that entire ordeal. You want to say you're drinking coffee? Pijem kafu. Drinking a coffee, the coffee, coffee in general — all the same three words. The noun changes its ending for its grammatical job (that's the accusative case doing the work there, turning kafa into kafu), but nothing gets bolted on the front to mark "definite" or "indefinite".
Beginners keep asking me "but where's the word for the?" — and the answer is that the question doesn't translate. It's like asking where the fourth wheel is on a bicycle.
Context, mostly — and it's far more reliable than newcomers fear. If you walk into a café and say Jednu kafu, molim (literally "one coffee, please"), everyone understands you want a coffee to appear. If your friend already bought you one and you say Gdje mi je kafa? — "where's my coffee?" — nobody thinks you mean coffee in the abstract. The situation makes it obvious, the way it does in the thousands of everyday sentences where English speakers don't consciously notice their own articles either.
When you really do need to be specific, the language has tools:
Point at it with a demonstrative. Ova kafa = this coffee. Ona kafa = that coffee. That's your "the" when you need one.
Move the word. Serbian and Montenegrin word order is flexible, and what you put first often carries the "known information", a bit like emphasis. Old news drifts to the front, new news lands at the end.
Just say a number or "some". Jedan (one), neki (some) do the indefinite job when it matters.
Notice these are tools you reach for only when precision counts — not a tax you pay on every single noun, every time, the way English makes you. Most sentences, you say nothing extra and lose nothing.
The flip side arrives when you go the other direction — a Montenegrin learning English has to grow an article habit from scratch, and it's brutal. For you heading into Slavic, though, it's pure upside: one fewer decision on every noun for the rest of your learning life. Enjoy it. Cases will ask for that spare attention soon enough — and when they do, at least you'll have the change to spend. (Gender is the next thing worth meeting early; I've laid out how masculine, feminine and neuter work in plain terms.)
Is there really no "the" in Serbian or Montenegrin? Correct — none, in any of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian or Montenegrin.
So how do I say "the coffee"? You just say "coffee" and let context do it, or "this/that coffee" if you must be exact.
Won't I be misunderstood? Almost never. Ambiguity is rarer than English speakers expect, because context is doing this job for you constantly already.
This is exactly the kind of thing we flag the moment it comes up in Gora — not a rule buried in a table, but a friendly "hey, good news, there's no word here" right when you'd otherwise go looking for one. Montenegrin's live now; come collect your free win.