nimisõnaliik

Nimisõnaliik refers to the grammatical category of nouns in Estonian. Nouns are words that represent persons, places, things, or ideas. In Estonian, nouns do not have grammatical gender, which is a simplification compared to many other Indo-European languages.

Estonian nouns are declined, meaning their form changes depending on their grammatical function within a sentence. This is primarily indicated by case endings. Estonian has fourteen grammatical cases: nominative, genitive, partitive, illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, abessive, comitative, and instructive. The nominative case is the base form of the noun and is used for the subject of a sentence. The other cases indicate various relationships like possession (genitive), partiality or indefinite quantity (partitive), and location or direction (illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative).

Another important aspect of Estonian nouns is number. Nouns can be singular or plural, indicating whether one or more than one of the entity is being referred to. Plural forms are also created by adding suffixes to the noun stem, which vary depending on the case. The concept of "nimisõnaliik" encompasses all these characteristics: its role as a naming word and its inflectional properties within the Estonian language.