Declinaties

Declinaties are the inflected forms a word can take to express grammatical categories such as case, number, and gender. In languages that use declension, a noun, pronoun, or adjective appears in a set of related forms called a paradigm or declination. Each form corresponds to particular grammatical roles, for example nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative cases, or singular and plural numbers.

Declinaties help indicate how words relate to one another in a sentence beyond word order. Adjectives and pronouns often decline to agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number, and case, producing additional declensions. Not all languages use declension to the same extent; some rely more on syntax and prepositions, while others have rich and regular inflectional systems.

Examples of languages with notable declensions include Latin, which has a detailed noun declension system with multiple cases; German, which uses four cases and gendered articles; and Russian, with six cases and three genders. In contrast, English has largely reduced declension, especially for nouns, and relies more on word order and function words to express grammatical relationships.

In linguistic terminology, the study of declinaties falls under inflection or morphology, which examines how words change form to encode grammatical information. The term declination itself comes from Latin and is used in many languages to describe this phenomenon, though the specific patterns and number of cases vary by language family and historical development.