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In linguistics, declension (verb: to decline) is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and articles to indicate number (e.g. singular, dual, plural), case (e.g. nominative case, accusative case, genitive case, dative case), gender (e.g. masculine, neuter, feminine), and a number of other grammatical categories. Meanwhile, the inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation. Declension occurs in many of the world's languages. It is an important aspect of language families like Quechuan (i.e., languages native to the Andes), Indo-European (e.g. German, Lithuanian, Latvian, Slavic, Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Albanian, Classical Armenian and Modern Armenian and Kurdish), Bantu (e.g. Zulu, Kikuyu), Semitic (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic), Finno-Ugric (e.g. Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian), and Turkic (e.g. Turkish). Old English was an inflectional language, but largely abandoned inflectional changes as it evolved into Modern English. Though traditionally classified as synthetic, Modern English has moved towards an analytic language. Unlike English, many languages use suffixes to specify subjects and objects and word cases in general. Inflected languages have a freer word order than modern English, an analytic language in which word order identifies the subject and object. As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different: "The dog chased a cat." "A cat chased the dog." Hypothetically speaking, suppose English were a language with a more complex declension system in which cases were formed by adding the suffixes: (for nominative singular), - (genitive), - (dative), - (accusative), - (locative), - (instrumental), - (vocative), - (ablative) The above sentence could be formed with any of the following word orders and would have the same meaning: "The dog chased a cat." "A cat chased the dog.

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Related concepts (100)

Grammatical case

A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals) which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived.

Declension

Inflection

In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness. The inflection of verbs is called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions and postpositions, numerals, articles, etc., as declension.