endelsen

Endelsen is a term used in linguistics to describe the final part of a word that carries grammatical information. In many languages, especially those of the Germanic family, endelsen functions as an inflectional suffix attached to a word stem to signal features such as person, number, tense, mood, case, or definiteness. The concept is central to morphology and helps explain how words change form to express different grammatical meanings.

Endelser appear across word classes. Verb endings indicate tense and person (for example, in German regular verbs in the present tense, ich singe, du singst, er singt, wir singen, ihr singt, sie singen). Noun endings can mark number or case, while adjectives may take endings to agree with the nouns they modify. Some languages rely heavily on endelser for grammar, whereas others use stricter word order or auxiliary constructions and show less inflection.

Cross-linguistically, endelser illustrate different strategies for encoding grammar. In Norwegian and Danish, for instance, nouns can take definite suffixes, so a form like huset or katten marks definiteness as part of the noun itself. In English, a productive ending is the third-person singular -s in the present tense (he walks). The study of endelser helps compare how languages encode similar grammatical information and how learners recognize patterns of inflection across languages.

See also: suffix, inflection, morphology.