The short version: words like my and your are adjectives in Serbian, so they agree with the thing owned, not the owner. My is moj with a masculine noun, moja with a feminine one and moje with a neuter one. Learn that one habit and the whole set falls into place — plus one special word, svoj, that English doesn't have.
Published 11 September 2026
In English, "my" never changes. You say my brother, my sister and my children without touching the word "my". Serbian doesn't work like that, and the sooner you stop expecting it to, the easier this gets. A Serbian possessive behaves like any other adjective: it takes an ending that matches the noun beside it. So the word for "my" comes out three different ways in the nominative — moj, moja, moje — depending on whether the thing owned is masculine, feminine or neuter.
That single idea — the ending matches what is owned, not who owns it — is the whole lesson. Everything below is just filling in the pattern.
The table below gives the seven non-reflexive possessives you'll use constantly. Moj and tvoj follow the same pattern as the reflexive svoj, which appears separately below. In the nominative singular, each word changes to match a masculine, feminine or neuter noun; the visible endings make that agreement easier to spot.
| English | with masculine | with feminine | with neuter |
|---|---|---|---|
| my | moj (brat) | moja (sestra) | moje (dete) |
| your (one person) | tvoj | tvoja | tvoje |
| his / its | njegov | njegova | njegovo |
| her | njen | njena | njeno |
| our | naš | naša | naše |
| your (plural / polite) | vaš | vaša | vaše |
| their | njihov | njihova | njihovo |
Read the table across, not down. Pick the row for the meaning you want ("my", "our"…), then choose the column that matches the gender of the noun. Moj grad (my city, masculine), moja škola (my school, feminine), moje more (my sea, neuter). If you're shaky on which nouns are which gender, that's the thing to nail first — our guide to noun gender is the foundation this whole pattern sits on.
Because they're adjectives, possessives don't stop at three forms — they also shift for case, just like dobar (good) does. You don't need the full grid today, but you should recognise it when it happens:
The endings there are the ordinary adjective endings, so once you've met the cases they cost you nothing extra. If you want to see where those endings come from, our walk-through of the accusative case and the way adjectives agree pick up exactly here.
This is the one genuinely new idea, and it's worth five minutes because it fixes a mistake nearly every beginner makes. Svoj is a reflexive possessive: it means "one's own" and always points back to the subject of the clause. Whenever the owner is also the person doing the action, careful Serbian uses svoj rather than moj, njegov or njen.
In the first and second person it rarely causes confusion, and everyday speech often uses moj or tvoj instead. In the third person, though, it changes the meaning:
English can use the ambiguous sentence "Ana drives her car" for both situations; Serbian tells them apart with one word. The choice of svoj never encodes whether the owner is a man, a woman, or a whole team — it just means "belonging to the subject". Its ending still agrees with the thing owned: svoj auto, but svoja kuća. That's what makes it so tidy: Svako voli svoju majku means "everyone loves their own mother", with none of the his/her/their awkwardness English gets into.
Rule of thumb: when the subject owns the object, and "his/her/their own" fits in English, standard Serbian wants svoj.
You'll meet both. They mean the same thing. Njen is the everyday choice in Serbian and Montenegrin; njezin turns up more in Croatian and can sound old-fashioned further east. Use njen and you'll always be understood — but don't be thrown when a text or a song reaches for njezin.
Fill in the right possessive. Answers below.
Do Serbian possessive adjectives change their endings? Yes. A possessive works like an adjective and agrees with the thing owned in gender, number and case. "My" is moj with a masculine noun (moj brat), moja with a feminine one (moja sestra) and moje with a neuter one (moje dete).
What is svoj and when do I use it? Svoj means "one's own" and points back to the subject of the clause. In standard Serbian, use it when the owner is also the subject: Ana vozi svoj auto means "Ana drives her own car", while Ana vozi njen auto means she drives another woman's. Its ending still agrees with the thing owned, not the owner.
Is it njen or njezin for "her"? Both exist and mean "her". Njen is the usual choice in Serbian and Montenegrin; njezin is more common in Croatian and sounds old-fashioned elsewhere. Either one is understood everywhere.
New to the language and wondering where all this fits? Start with our honest guide to learning Serbian, which lays out the order that makes grammar like this click. And in the app, every possessive the fox teaches you turns up inside a real sentence with the agreement already working, so the endings become a habit instead of a chart. Try a lesson and watch how quickly moj / moja / moje stops being a decision.