käändevorme

Käändevormid, or inflected forms, are the morphological variants a word can take to convey grammatical information. In Estonian linguistics, käändevormid are the tangible outputs of inflection, which allows a word to indicate roles such as who is doing what to whom, when, and under what conditions.

Nouns and pronouns inflect for number (singular or plural) and for case, which encodes syntactic relations like subject, object, location, movement, or source. Adjectives and numerals agree with the noun in case and number, and in some contexts with other modifiers. Verbs inflect for person and number in finite forms, and they mark time through tense and aspect, as well as mood (such as indicative or conditional); Estonian also uses non-finite forms formed from participles and infinitives. Together, these inflected forms enable flexible word order while preserving grammatical relations.

Käändevormid are typically built by suffixation, the addition of endings to a word stem. Some forms involve changes to the stem (ablaut) or irregular endings in a subset of words. The system is part of Estonian’s agglutinative morphology, where multiple suffixes express different grammatical categories.

In usage, knowing a word’s käändevorm helps determine its function in a sentence, and is essential for dictionary entries, readability, and language technology such as parsers and lemmatizers.