gendernumbercase

Gender, number, and case are three grammatical categories that many languages use to indicate the function and relationship of words in a sentence, particularly nouns, pronouns, and their modifiers. Gender is a classification that normally divides nouns into masculine, feminine, and sometimes neuter, or into a broader set of semantic categories such as animate vs. inanimate. Number distinguishes singular, plural, and sometimes dual or trial. Case marks the syntactic role of a noun or pronoun, such as nominative for subjects, accusative for direct objects, genitive for possession, dative for indirect objects, and others such as locative, instrument, or vocative.

In Indo‑European languages, these categories often combine into a single inflectional paradigm. For instance, in Latin, the word for “girl” is puella in the nominative singular, puellae in the genitive singular, puellas in the accusative plural, etc., showing the interaction of gender (feminine), number (plural), and case (genitive, accusative). German uses case but only masculine, feminine, neuter genders in the nominative. Slavic languages preserve a rich case system and for some, such as Russian, nouns have optional gender forms for inanimate and animate distinctions.

Languages that lack overt case markings, such as English, express grammatical relations through word order and prepositions, but still retain gender distinctions in pronouns and some lexical items. Austronesian languages occasionally encode number and gender invisibly through clusivity distinctions. Linguists study these categories to understand typological patterns, language change, and syntactic structure.