ändmorfem

ändmorfem, or ending morpheme, is a morpheme that attaches to the end of a word to express grammatical information. In many languages these endings are suffixes and encode categories such as number, person, tense, mood, case, gender, or definiteness. End morphemes are typically inflectional: they modify a word's form to indicate grammatical function without usually changing its core lexical meaning.

End morphemes vs root and derivational morphemes: the latter create new words or shift lexical category; end morphemes mainly adjust grammatical relations. Some languages also employ stem vowel changes together with endings (ablaut) but the ending itself remains a separate unit.

Examples: English uses plural -s (dog/dogs), past tense -ed (walk/walked), and possessive -'s (the girl's hat). These endings attach after the word stem and signal number, tense, or possession.

In Swedish, endings similarly mark definiteness, number, and comparison of nouns and verbs. Definite forms on some nouns are created by endings such as -en/-n or -et/-t; plural nouns take endings like -ar, -er, or -or; genitive is marked with -s.

Analysis and usage: linguists identify end morphemes in morphological parsing, often representing the final morpheme segment of the word. They are central to the study of inflectional systems and cross-linguistic typology.