Nominativ

Nominativ, or the nominative case, is a grammatical category used in many languages to mark the subject of a sentence. The term derives from Latin nominativus, meaning the naming or subject case. In languages with a case system, the nominative typically identifies the noun phrase that performs the action of the verb or stands as a predicate noun or adjective in equational clauses.

In languages with nominative–accusative alignment, the nominative marks the subject of both intransitive and transitive verbs, while the accusative marks the direct object. It often interacts with articles, adjectives, and pronoun forms to indicate number and gender. German, for example, uses der/die/das and corresponding adjective endings in the nominative to mark the subject, as in Der Mann schläft. Latin uses the nominative for the subject of a finite verb, with noun endings signaling number and gender.

In Russian, Latin, and many other inflected languages, nouns and pronouns take distinct nominative forms for the subject, sometimes with additional morphology for number and gender. In English, the nominative is most visible in personal pronouns (I, he, she, we, they); nouns typically lack a distinct nominative form and rely on word order.

Some languages have little or no case marking, relying on syntax rather than morphology to indicate subject role. Others employ ergative or other alignments, where the subject of transitive verbs is marked differently from the subject of intransitive verbs.