sklony

Sklony is a linguistic term used to describe the complete set of inflectional forms that a word can take within a language. The word is drawn from Slavic linguistic traditions, where related concepts are commonly referred to as declensions or inflectional paradigms. In contemporary usage, sklony refer to the organized patterns of form that reflect grammatical categories such as case, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, and person.

In practice, the content of a sklona depends on the word class. For nouns and pronouns, sklony typically encode case and number, and in many languages also gender. For adjectives, sklony reflect agreement with the noun they modify in gender, number, and case. Verbs have sklony that cover person, number, tense or aspect, mood, voice, and sometimes evidentiality. Some languages, such as Finnish or certain Baltic and Slavic languages, exhibit large and highly regular sklony, while others use more analytic structures with fewer distinct forms.

Sklony are central to linguistic description, lexicography, and language technology. They enable dictionaries to present a word’s full inflectional paradigm and support natural language processing tasks such as morphological analysis, lemmatization, and generation. Understanding sklony helps explain why word forms change in sentences and how meaning is expressed through grammatical structure.

See also: declension, inflection, morphology, paradigm.