German declension is the paradigm that German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 uses to define all the ways words can change shape to reflect their role in the sentence: subject, object, etc. Declension allows speakers to mark a difference between subjects, objects, indirect objects and possessives by changing the form of the word—or its associated article—instead of indicating this meaning through word order or prepositions (e.g. English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

). As a result, German can take a much more fluid approach to word order without the meaning being obscured.

As a fusional language

Fusional language

A fusional language is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes in a way that can be difficult to segment....

, German marks

Marker (linguistics)

In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. In analytic languages and agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished. In fusional languages and polysynthetic languages, this is often not...

 noun

Noun

In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...

s, pronoun

Pronoun

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...

s, articles, and adjective

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....

s to distinguish case

Grammatical case

In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...

, number

Grammatical number

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....

, and gender

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

.

Modern High German distinguishes between four cases—nominative

Nominative case

The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...

, accusative

Accusative case

The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...

, dative

Dative case

The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....

, and genitive

Genitive case

In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun...

—and three grammatical gender

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

s—feminine, masculine, and neuter. Nouns may also be either singular or plural

Plural

In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...

.

Definite article

Definite Article

Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzard's 1996 performance released on VHS. It was recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre...

s

These correspond to the English "the".

	Nom.	Acc.	Dat.	Gen.
Masculine	der	den	dem	des
Neuter	das	das	dem	des
Feminine	die	die	der	der
Plural	die	die	den	der

Indefinite articles

These correspond to English "a", "an", or "one". There is no plural; German uses words like "einige" and "manche" to express the concept of "some" or "a few."

	Nom.	Acc.	Dat.	Gen.
Masculine	ein	einen	einem	eines
Neuter	ein	ein	einem	eines
Feminine	eine	eine	einer	einer

Nouns

Only the following nouns are declined according to case:

• Masculine weak nouns gain an -n (sometimes -en) at the end in cases other than nominative.
• The genitive case of other nouns of masculine or neuter gender is formed by adding -s (sometimes -es).
• Nouns in plural that do not already end in -n or -s (found in loanwords) gain an -n in the dative case.

There is a dative singular marking -e associated with strong masculine or neuter nouns, e.g. der Tod and das Bad, but this is nearly obsolete in contemporary usage, with the exception of fossilized phrases, such as zum Tode verurteilt ("sentenced to death"), or titles of creative works, e.g. Venus im Bade ("Venus In The Bath").

Personal pronoun

Personal pronoun

Personal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known languages contain personal pronouns.- English personal pronouns :English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:*first-person singular...

s

Genitive case for pronouns is currently considered archaic and is used only in certain archaic expressions like "ich bedarf seiner" (I need him)

Nom.	Acc.	Dat.	Gen.
ich - I	mich - me	mir - to/for me	meiner
du - you (informal singular)	dich - you	dir - to/for you	deiner
er - he	ihn - him	ihm - to/for him	seiner
sie - she	sie - her	ihr - to/for her	ihrer
es - it	es - it	ihm - to/for it	seiner
wir - we	uns - us	uns - to/for us	unserer
ihr - you (informal plural)	euch - you	euch - to/for you	eurer
Sie - you (formal singular & plural)	Sie - you	Ihnen - to/for you	Ihrer
sie - they	sie - them	ihnen - to/for them	ihrer

Interrogative pronouns

Interrogative word

In linguistics, an interrogative word is a function word used for the item interrupted in an information statement. Interrogative words are sometimes called wh-words because most of English interrogative words start with wh-...

 

	Nom.	Acc.	Dat.	Gen.
Personal ("who/whom")	wer	wen	wem	wessen
Impersonal ("what")	was	was	1	1

1. There is neither a dative nor a genitive of the impersonal interrogative pronoun. Generally, prepositions that need to be followed by either case merge with "was" to form new words such as "wovon" ("whereof") or "weswegen" ("for what reason").

Relative pronoun

Relative pronoun

A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...

s

	Nom.	Acc.	Dat.	Gen.
Masculine	der	den	dem	dessen
Neuter	das	das	dem	dessen
Feminine	die	die	der	deren
Plural	die	die	denen	deren

Possessive pronoun

Possessive pronoun

A possessive pronoun is a part of speech that substitutes for a noun phrase that begins with a possessive determiner . For example, in the sentence These glasses are mine, not yours, the words mine and yours are possessive pronouns and stand for my glasses and your glasses, respectively...

s

All possessive pronouns conform to the same inflectional paradigm:

	Nom.	Acc.	Dat.	Gen.
Masculine	-	-en	-em	-es
Neuter	-	-	-em	-es
Feminine	-e	-e	-er	-er
Plural	-e	-e	-en	-er

To illustrate, here is the complete paradigm of mein ("my").

	Nom.	Acc.	Dat.	Gen.
Masculine	mein	meinen	meinem	meines
Neuter	mein	mein	meinem	meines
Feminine	meine	meine	meiner	meiner
Plural	meine	meine	meinen	meiner

Demonstrative pronouns

These may be used in place of personal pronouns to provide emphasis, as in the sentence "Den sehe ich" ("I see that"). Also note the word ordering: den corresponds to "that", and ich corresponds to "I". Placing the object at the beginning of the sentence places emphasis on it. English, as a generally non-declined language, does not normally show similar behavior, although it is sometimes possible to place the object at the front of a sentence for similar emphasis, as in: "Him I see, but I don't see John".

	Nom.	Acc.	Dat.	Gen.
Masculine	der	den	dem	dessen
Neuter	das	das	dem	dessen
Feminine	die	die	der	deren
Plural	die	die	denen	deren

Reflexive pronoun

Reflexive pronoun

A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that is preceded by the noun, adjective, adverb or pronoun to which it refers within the same clause. In generative grammar, a reflexive pronoun is an anaphor that must be bound by its antecedent...

s

Used when a subject and object are the same, as in "Ich wasche mich" = "I wash myself"

Accusative	Dative
mich - myself	mir - to/for myself
dich - yourself	dir - to/for yourself
sich - himself/herself/itself/oneself	sich - to/for himself/herself/itself/oneself
uns - ourselves	uns - to/for ourselves
euch - yourselves	euch - to/for yourselves
sich - yourself/yourselves (formal)	sich - to/for yourself/yourselves
sich - themselves	sich - to/for themselves

the pronoun "man"

Nominative	Accusative	Dative	Genitive
man - one/you/they	einen - one/you/them	einem - to/for one/you/them	sein - one's/your/their

Attributive adjectives

Predicate adjectives are undeclined. Other adjectives use the following declension patterns.

Strong inflection

This is used when there is no preceding definite article.

	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine	Plural
Nom.	-er	-es	-e	-e
Acc.	-en	-es	-e	-e
Dat.	-em	-em	-er	-en
Gen.	-en	-en	-er	-er

Here's an example.

	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine	Plural
Nom.	grüner Tee	klares Wasser	rote Tinte	alkoholfreie Getränke
Acc.	grünen Tee	klares Wasser	rote Tinte	alkoholfreie Getränken
Dat.	grünem Tee	klarem Wasser	roter Tinte	alkoholfreien Getränken
Gen.	grünen Tee	klaren Wassers	roter Tinte	alkoholfreier Getränken

Weak inflection

This is used when there is a preceding definite article ("der-word"). These include jen- ("that, those"), solch- ("such a"), manch- ("many, some"), jed- ("each, every"), all- ("all"), dies- ("this, these"), and welch- ("which").

	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine	Plural
Nom.	-e	-e	-e	-en
Acc.	-en	-e	-e	-en
Dat.	-en	-en	-en	-en
Gen.	-en	-en	-en	-en

	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine	Plural
Nom.	welcher grüne Tee	dieses klare Wasser	solche rote Tinte	alle alkoholfreien Getränke
Acc.	welchen grünen Tee	dieses klare Wasser	solche rote Tinte	alle alkoholfreien Getränken
Dat.	welchem grünen Tee	diesem klaren Wasser	solcher roten Tinte	allen alkoholfreien Getränken
Gen.	welches grünen Tee	dieses klaren Wassers	solcher roten Tinte	aller alkoholfreien Getränken

Mixed inflection

This is used when there is a preceding ein-word (i.e. words like mein, dein, sein, kein etc.) or one that declines alike (like unser for example).

	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine	Plural
Nom.	-er	-es	-e	-en
Acc.	-en	-es	-e	-en
Dat.	-en	-en	-en	-en
Gen.	-en	-en	-en	-en

Mixed inflection is same as weak inflection, except bold suffixes (masculine nominative, neuter nominative and accusative) that are same as strong inflection.

	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine	Plural
Nom.	mein grüner Tee	euer klares Wasser	seine rote Tinte	keine alkoholfreien Getränke
Acc.	meinen grünen Tee	euer klares Wasser	seine rote Tinte	keine alkoholfreien Getränken
Dat.	meinem grünen Tee	euren klarem Wasser	seiner roten Tinte	keinen alkoholfreien Getränken
Gen.	meines grünen Tee	eures klaren Wassers	seiner roten Tinte	keiner alkoholfreien Getränken

Non-declining geographic attributive adjectives

Many German locality names have an attributive adjective associated with them which ends in -er, for example Berliner for Berlin and Hamburger for Hamburg, which are not marked for case but always end in -er. If the place name ends in -en, like Göttingen, the -er usually replaces the terminal -en.

External Links

• Summary sheet to learn the decline of German adjectives