Locatives

Locatives are a grammatical category used to express location relative to a reference point. They may appear as a dedicated locative case affixed to a noun or pronoun, or as locative constructions formed with prepositions or postpositions in analytic languages. Locatives typically indicate static location rather than movement toward or away from a location, a distinction often encoded by separate directional or ablative cases in some languages.

In languages with a locative case, nouns receive endings that mark location. Finnish and Estonian provide well-known examples: inessive or illative for location inside or into, adessive for on or at, elative for out of, and allative for onto or toward. These systems are highly productive and can include additional local cases. Turkish, by contrast, relies on suffixes attached to the noun (such as -de/-da for in/on/at) to express locative meaning, reflecting a primarily agglutinative approach to locative marking.

Historically, some languages had a dedicated locative case that applied to a limited set of place names or phrases. Latin is a notable example, with a locative used for certain cities and islands, mostly replaced by prepositional phrases in later stages of the language. In many Slavic languages, location is expressed with a combination of prepositions and cases, forming locative or prepositional constructions.

Locatives are frequently contrasted with allatives or illatives, which encode motion toward a location rather than static location. In English, locative meaning is typically conveyed through prepositional phrases (in the room, on the table). The study of locatives spans morphology, syntax, and typology, highlighting substantial cross-linguistic variation in how languages encode location.