flektierbar

Flektierbar is a term used in linguistics to describe words that can take inflectional endings to express grammatical categories such as case, number, gender, person, tense, mood, or voice. The word derives from flektieren, itself from Latin flectere meaning "to bend." In many grammars, including German, flektierbar items form the core of morphology: nouns and pronouns inflect for case and number; adjectives inflect to agree with the noun; verbs conjugate for person and number as well as tense, mood and voice; determiners such as articles and demonstratives also show inflection.

Examples illustrate the concept. The noun Mann becomes Männer in the plural and Mannes in the genitive singular. The adjective klein changes to klein, kleinere, kleinstes depending on gender, number and case. The verb gehen yields ich gehe, du gehst, er geht, wir gehen, ihr geht, sie gehen; forms like ging and gegangen express past tense and perfect aspect. These are all inflectional forms.

Some words are typically non-flektiable, meaning they do not change form to express these categories, such as many interjections (ach!, hallo) or certain particles and fixed expressions; prepositions themselves do not inflect, though they influence case assignment.

Across languages, flektierbar items are common in languages with rich morphology, such as German, Latin, or Russian; in isolating languages like Mandarin, most content words are not inflected, and grammatical relations are shown by word order or auxiliary words.

In linguistic description and language learning, flektierbar is used to classify words by their inflectional behavior and to describe morpho-syntactic patterns and paradigms.