endaningar

Endaningar are inflectional morphemes attached to words to signal grammatical features such as case, number, gender, tense, mood, and person. In Icelandic grammar, the term endaningar is used to refer to these suffixes, which appear on nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs. Endaningar allow speakers to convey who or what acts, when it happens, and how forms relate to each other without relying solely on word order.

On nouns and adjectives, endaningar indicate case and number, and they contribute to definiteness and agreement. Nouns have different endings in singular and plural forms, and adjectives change their endings to match the noun in case and number. This agreement helps clarify which noun is being described or acted upon, even in sentences with flexible word order.

On verbs, endaningar mark person and number in finite clauses and encode tense, mood, and voice through verb endings. Icelandic commonly uses distinct endings for first, second, and third person singular and plural in present and past tenses, with additional endings for subjunctive and imperative forms. Verb classes, such as strong and weak verbs, influence the specific endings.

General characteristics: the use of endaningar contributes to the overt morphology of Icelandic, enabling relatively free word order while maintaining grammatical clarity. The system has been retained from the language’s Indo-Norse ancestry and continues to be an important feature of Icelandic grammar.

See also inflection, morphology, Icelandic grammar.