navneform

Navneform is a linguistic term used in Danish and Norwegian grammar to denote the base, dictionary, or lemma form of a word—the form chosen as the headword in dictionaries or lexical databases. The navneform serves as the canonical form from which other inflected forms are derived through morphology. In many contexts, the navneform is the form used for indexing and reference, and it is what language learners and natural language processing systems commonly normalize to when performing lemmatization or stemming.

In nouns, the navneform is typically the base singular form, often the form that appears in dictionaries; in many cases this is the nominative or indefinite form. In verbs, the navneform is usually the infinitive or infinitive-like dictionary form. For adjectives and pronouns, the navneform is the reference form used in dictionaries; inflected variants (such as plural, comparative, tense, or case) are derived from it.

Navneform differs from inflected forms that appear due to grammatical categories such as number, gender, case, tense, mood, or voice. The concept is closely related to the English terms lemma, headword, or base form. In computational linguistics, navneform is central to token normalization, lemmatization, and dictionary lookups, enabling consistent analysis across inflected variants.

Limitations: the exact definition can vary by language and scholarly tradition. Some linguists distinguish between navneform (lemma) and headword in dictionaries or use related terms such as grundform. Overall, navneform provides a standardized reference point for lexical representation and analysis.