adjectiveinflection

Adjective inflection is the morphological variation of adjectives to express grammatical information such as agreement with nouns, degree, or other features in a language. Inflection, the broad process, enables adjectives to reflect attributes like gender, number, and case, as well as degree of comparison in many languages.

In languages with strong noun–adjective concord, adjectives change their endings to match the nouns they modify. This agreement can cover gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), number (singular, plural), and case (nominative, accusative, etc.). Examples include Spanish, German, and Russian. In Spanish, adjectives typically agree in gender and number with the noun (niño alto vs niña alta; los niños altos). In German, adjectives may take different endings depending on article presence and case (ein guter Mann, eine gute Frau; die guten Männer). In Russian, adjectives decline for gender, number, and case to agree with the noun.

Some languages rely less on agreement. English largely lacks gender or number inflection in adjectives, and number is generally not reflected except in degree forms (tall, taller, tallest). Turkish and other Turkic languages often show little to no adjective inflection for gender or number, with degree expressed analytically rather than morphologically.

Degree inflection, or comparison, is another dimension: adjectives may form comparative and superlative forms (big, bigger, biggest) or use periphrastic constructions (more beautiful, most beautiful). Predicative and attributive positions can influence inflection patterns in some languages, though many systems unify these forms.

Adjective inflection thus ranges from rich agreement systems to minimal or analytic patterns, reflecting broad typological diversity in how languages encode descriptive modifiers.