declension
Sign in to saveIn linguistics, declension (verb: to decline) is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence by way of an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and determiners. It serves to indicate number (e.g. singular, dual, plural), case (e.g. nominative, accusative, genitive, or dative), gender (e.g. masculine, feminine, or neuter), and a number of other grammatical categories. Inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.
Declension is the process where words like nouns, pronouns, and adjectives change their form to show their grammatical role in a sentence—for example, whether they're singular or plural, or what case they're in (like nominative or accusative). This system of changing word forms helps readers and listeners understand the grammatical relationships between words and what function each word serves in a sentence.
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25 sectionsContents
- English-speaking perspective
- History
- Modern English
- Nouns
- Pronouns
- Adjectives and adverbs
- Determiners
- Latin
- Sanskrit
- Declension in specific languages
- Arabic
- Greek and Latin
- Celtic languages
- Germanic languages
- Baltic languages
- Slavic languages
- Romance languages
- Indo-Aryan languages
- Uralic languages
- Languages that lost their declension system
- See also
- Notes and references
- Notes
- Citations
- External links
In linguistics, declension (verb: to decline) is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence by way of an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and determiners. It serves to indicate number (e.g. singular, dual, plural), case (e.g. nominative, accusative, genitive, or dative), gender (e.g. masculine, feminine, or neuter), and a number of other grammatical categories. Inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.
Declension occurs in many languages. It is an important aspect of language families like Quechuan (i.e., languages native to the Andes), Indo-European (e.g. German, Icelandic, Irish, Lithuanian and Latvian, Slavic, Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient and Modern Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Kurdish, and Modern Armenian), Bantu (e.g. Swahili, Zulu, Kikuyu), Semitic (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic), Finno-Ugric (e.g. Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian), and Turkic (e.g. Turkish).