Serbo-Croatian is a highly inflected language. Traditional grammars list seven cases for nouns and adjectives: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental, reflecting the original seven cases of Proto-Slavic, and indeed older forms of Serbo-Croatian itself. However, in modern Shtokavian the locative has almost merged into dative (the only difference is based on accent in some cases), and the other cases can be shown declining; namely: For all nouns and adjectives, the instrumental, dative, and locative forms are identical (at least orthographically) in the plural: ženama, ženama, ženama; očima, očima, očima; riječima, riječima, riječima. There is an accentual difference between the genitive singular and genitive plural of masculine and neuter nouns, which are otherwise homonyms (seljáka, seljaka) except that on occasion an "a" (which might or might not appear in the singular) is filled between the last letter of the root and the genitive plural ending (kapitalizma, kapitalizama). The old instrumental ending "ju" of the feminine consonant stems and in some cases the "a" of the genitive plural of certain other sorts of feminine nouns is fast yielding to "i": noći instead of noćju, borbi instead of boraba and so forth. Almost every Shtokavian number is indeclinable, and numbers after prepositions have not been declined for a long time.
Serbo-Croatian is a highly inflected language Traditional grammars list seven cases for nouns and adjectives nominative genitive dative accusative vocative locative and instrumental reflecting the original seven cases of Proto-Slavic and indeed older forms of Serbo-Croatian itself However in modern Shtokavian the locative has almost merged into dative (the only difference is based on accent in some cases) and the other cases can be shown declining; namely For all nouns and adjectives the instrumental dative and locative forms are identical (at least orthographically) in the plural ženama ženama ženama; očima očima očima; riječima riječima riječima There is an accentual difference between the genitive singular and genitive plural of masculine and neuter nouns which are otherwise homonyms (seljáka seljaka) except that on occasion an "a" (which might or might not appear in the singular) is filled between the last letter of the root and the genitive plural ending (kapitalizma kapitalizama) The old instrumental ending "ju" of the feminine consonant stems and in some cases the "a" of the genitive plural of certain other sorts of feminine nouns is fast yielding to "i" noći instead of noćju borbi instead of boraba and so forth Almost every Shtokavian number is indeclinable and numbers after prepositions have not been declined for a long time