odmiennie

Odmiennie is a term used in Polish grammar to denote the property of a word to take different forms depending on grammatical context. It describes how a word changes its shape to express category such as case, number, gender, person, tense or mood. The related adjective is odmienny (declinable, inflected), and the noun form odmienność refers to the concept of inflection itself.

In Polish, most lexical categories are odmiennie: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and some adverbs undergo declension or conjugation. Verbs are described as being conjugated, which is a type of inflection also covered by the broader idea of odmienność. Inflection allows speakers to indicate who or what is involved, when an action occurs, or how attributes relate to a noun.

The term is used to contrast with nieodmiennie, meaning "indeclinable" or "not inflected." Indeclinable words do not change form to reflect grammatical categories. Examples often cited in grammar descriptions include Polish nouns like dom (singular nominative) and domu (singular genitive), which demonstrate case-based inflection, or adjectives like dobry, which change to odpowiednie forms (dobrego, dobremu, dobry) according to gender, number, and case.

Odmienność as a concept is central to morphological description in many languages, guiding how dictionaries present base forms and how grammars categorize word classes by their inflectional patterns.