Declinazione

Declinazione is the set of inflectional endings that mark grammatical category such as case, number and, in some languages, gender for nouns, adjectives and pronouns. The term, from Latin declinatio, describes how a word’s form changes within a paradigm to reflect its syntactic function in a sentence. In many languages with declensional morphology, each noun or pronoun belongs to a declension or to a class of endings, and correspondingly its forms vary across cases and numbers.

In languages with rich case systems, declension paradigms specify distinct endings for nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and sometimes other cases, across singular and plural. Latin provides a classic example: multiple noun declensions with characteristic endings, and adjectives that agree in gender, number, and case with the nouns they modify. Other languages with declensions include Greek, German, Russian and Sanskrit, each with its own set of cases and paradigm patterns.

Italian offers a modern contrast: nouns show gender and number but largely lack a productive case system in the way Latin or German does. Articles, adjectives and pronouns reflect gender and number, but noun endings do not provide separate case forms in ordinary usage. In historical and comparative linguistics, the idea of declination is used to describe the inflectional patterns of a word’s paradigm across language families, and to compare how different languages encode grammatical relationships through endings.