nominativo

Nominativo is a term used in Italian to refer to two related concepts in language and identification. Etymologically it comes from the Latin nominativus, meaning “pertaining to naming.”

In linguistics, nominativo or nominative case denotes a grammatical category used in many languages to mark the subject of a sentence or, in some languages, a predicate nominative. In languages with rich inflection, nouns, pronouns, and sometimes adjectives change form to indicate subject function. Classic examples include Latin, Greek, German, and Russian, where subject nouns appear in the nominative form. Modern Italian, by contrast, has little to no productive noun declension by case, and the subject is typically identified by word order or pronouns rather than a distinct nominative ending. The term remains common in linguistic descriptions and philology when analyzing older texts or other languages.

In administrative and everyday Italian, nominativo also means the name or full name of a person used for identification, especially on forms, documents, and accounts. For example, a “nominativo” field in a form requires the individual’s given name and surname. The phrase “intestatario nominativo” refers to a contract or account registered in a specific person’s name rather than a company or organization. Thus, nominativo encompasses both a technical grammatical concept and a practical usage related to naming and identification.