casesuffix

Case suffix, sometimes written as case-suffix, is a bound morpheme attached to a noun, pronoun, or occasionally an adjective to mark grammatical case and indicate the noun’s syntactic function within a sentence. Unlike prepositions, which express relational meaning separately, a case suffix inflects the noun directly.

In languages with explicit case systems, the suffix signals roles such as agent or patient, possession, location, direction, and other relational meanings. The same suffix form can appear in combination with other endings to encode multiple grammatical features, depending on the language’s morphology. Case suffixes are a central feature of inflectional systems and interact with agreement patterns and word order, shaping how sentences are parsed.

Examples are found in Turkish, Finnish, Russian, Latin, and many other languages. In Turkish, locative and genitive meanings are conveyed by suffixes attached to the noun, as in -de (in/at) or -in (of). In Finnish, suffixes like -ssa (in) and -sta (from) attach to stems to express location and origin. In Russian and Latin, noun endings reflect cases such as nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and locative, guiding grammatical relations without relying solely on word order.

Case suffixes are often discussed in linguistic typology as part of inflectional morphology. They contrast with analytic devices such as separate case markers (prepositions, articles) and with fixed word order strategies. They are common in fusional and agglutinative languages, where multiple grammatical features are packaged into one or more suffixes on the noun.