Deklinace

Declinace, or declension, is the morphological process by which words change form to indicate their grammatical role in a sentence. In languages with rich inflection, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and numerals take different endings to express case, number, and gender. The term deklinace is commonly used in Czech and other Slavic languages, though similar systems exist in many Indo-European languages.

In Czech, deklinace organizes words into declension classes that determine endings. There are seven grammatical cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental. Each noun has a gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and a number (singular, plural). Noun endings vary by declension pattern and by phonology; masculine nouns, for example, may show different forms for animate and inanimate nouns. Adjectives and pronouns must agree with the nouns they modify in case, number, and gender, and thus they follow corresponding endings. Numerals also decline when used with a noun.

Declension is essential for conveying syntactic and semantic relations in languages that rely on inflection: case endings signal the roles of subjects, objects, possessors, and other participants, while word order can be more flexible. In contrast, analytic languages such as English use prepositions and order more to convey similar relations. Studying deklinace involves learning the main declension patterns and their irregular forms for different noun classes and parts of speech.