käändust

Käändust is a term used in Estonian grammar to refer to inflection, specifically the modification of a word's ending to indicate its grammatical function within a sentence. This process is crucial for expressing grammatical relationships such as case, number, and sometimes gender or tense. Estonian is an agglutinative language, meaning that suffixes are added to a root word to convey these grammatical meanings, and käändust encompasses the systematic application of these suffix changes.

There are numerous cases in Estonian, typically around 14, each with its own set of suffixes. These cases indicate the role of a noun, pronoun, or adjective in relation to other words in the sentence, such as subject, object, possession, location, or movement. For example, the nominative case is the base form, while the genitive indicates possession, and the partitive often denotes an incomplete action or a part of something. Understanding käändust is fundamental to constructing grammatically correct Estonian sentences and comprehending the nuances of its word order flexibility, which is partly enabled by the clear marking of grammatical roles through case endings.