articleinflected

Articleinflected is a linguistic label used to describe languages in which articles or determiners bear morphological markings that encode grammatical features such as gender, number, case, or definiteness. In this sense, the article itself carries part of the grammatical load that other languages might place on nouns or adjectives. The term is mainly used in typological descriptions and discussions of determiner systems, and it is often contrasted with languages that have uninflected articles (such as English, where the definite article the does not change form for case or gender) or with languages that lack articles entirely.

In practice, articleinflected systems appear in a variety of implementations. German is a representative case, with definite articles der/die/das and their forms that decline for gender, case, and number, and with indefinite articles ein/eine/ein that likewise agree. Icelandic and several Baltic languages combine determiners with the noun in morphologically rich ways, sometimes attaching a definite article as a suffix to the noun, which is another route to inflection of definiteness. Scandinavian languages such as Swedish and Danish also exhibit inflected or suffixed definite articles in their noun phrases, where the form of the determiner reflects gender, number, or definiteness.

The term is not universally standardized, and some linguists prefer alternatives such as inflected determiners or case- and gender-marked articles. Regardless of naming, articleinflected languages illustrate how determiners participate in morphology and syntax, influencing noun phrase structure, agreement, and cross-linguistic typology.