käändluses

Käändlused are the suffixal inflections that mark grammatical relations in Estonian. They attach to noun, pronoun, and adjective stems to indicate the role a word plays in a sentence, such as subject, object, location, or direction. The Estonian case system is relatively rich, and nouns and adjectives typically decline across multiple cases. Endings are shaped by phonological rules, including vowel harmony and, for some stems, consonant gradation, which can alter the stem before or after affixation. Most nouns have forms for the major cases, while pronouns and some adjectives have irregular or special forms.

In practice, case marking often substitutes for prepositions, giving Estonian a flexible word order. While the nominative noun is commonly used for the subject, other cases encode an array of syntactic and semantic relations, allowing speakers to express location, movement, possession, accompaniment, manner, and more through the word ending alone.

Common cases cover a range of spatial and functional meanings. These include the nominative (subject), genitive (possession), partitive (partial object or indefinite quantity), and a set of locative and directional cases such as inessive (inside), elative (out of), illative (into), allative (onto), adessive (on), and ablative (from). Additional cases such as translative (becoming), essive (as), abessive (without), and comitative (with) expand the system further, enabling nuanced expressions of state, role, and accompaniment.

Phonology influences the form of endings: vowel harmony governs suffix vowels, and certain stems undergo consonant changes when endings are added. Irregular forms occur, especially in pronouns and a few adjectives. Overall, käändlused are a central feature of Estonian grammar, essential for conveying syntactic relationships and meaning through word endings.