deklinacji

Deklinacja (declension) is a system in linguistics by which words change form to reflect grammatical categories such as case, number and gender. It is a key feature of many inflectional languages, enabling relationships between sentence elements to be expressed through word endings rather than fixed word order. In Polish grammar, deklinacja refers specifically to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals to mark grammatical cases and numbers.

In Polish, the set of cases typically used includes seven: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and vocative. The form a word takes in each case depends on its gender and its declension pattern, or class. Adjectives and numerals generally decline to agree with the nouns they modify in case, number and gender, producing a coordinated inflection throughout a phrase. Some words have irregular or mixed declensions, and certain cases may involve stem changes or zero endings in particular environments.

The practical function of declension is to signal grammatical roles such as subject, direct object, instrument, or location, allowing relatively flexible word order. Prepositions often determine or influence the required case for the following noun, further shaping sentence structure and meaning.

Historically, declension is a hallmark of inflectional languages and derives from older Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Slavic systems. Similar ideas appear across languages—Latin, Russian, and other Slavic languages maintain their own declension patterns. Across languages, declension provides a way to encode syntactic relationships and semantic distinctions through word-form changes rather than relying solely on word position.