Genitif

Genitif, or genitive, is a grammatical case used in many languages to express a range of relationships between nouns, most commonly possession. In languages with explicit noun inflection, the genitive marks a noun as related to another noun (the possessor or a related attribute). In analytic languages, possessive relations are often shown with prepositions or possessive pronouns rather than a dedicated case. The term appears in various languages with slight spelling variants, such as genitief in Dutch, Génitif in French, and Genitiv in German and several Nordic languages.

Across languages, the genitive serves functions beyond possession. It can denote origin, measurement, part-whole relationships, description, and various relational meanings that connect nouns to other elements in the noun phrase or clause. The exact marking—suffixes in inflected languages or prepositional phrases in analytic ones—varies by language and historical development.

English uses two common forms near the boundary of the genitive: the 's-possessive (the teacher's book) and the of-possessive (the book of the teacher). Some languages have a more productive or morphologically rich genitive system, with endings that agree with gender, number, or class, and which may express multiple genitive functions in one case.

Historically, the genitive traces back to Proto-Indo-European and has evolved into diverse forms across the Indo-European family and beyond. It remains a central concept in grammar, typology, and historical linguistics. See also possessive, case system, and prepositional phrase.