Endings on nouns showing their role in the sentence — who did it, who it was done to, whose it is.
In precise terms
An inflectional category marking the grammatical or semantic relation of a noun phrase to its head. Case systems range from two members to more than a dozen.
An example
Talossa on kissa.
There is a cat in the house.
What is going on here
Finnish 'talossa' is 'talo' (house) plus the inessive ending '-ssa', meaning 'in'. Where English uses a preposition, Finnish uses a case ending. Finnish has around fifteen such cases, most of them spatial.
Why this matters when you are learning a language
In a case language, word order is freed for other work — emphasis, topic, information structure — because the endings carry the roles. Learners from fixed-order languages often under-use that freedom.
Across languages
German has four cases, Russian six, Finnish around fifteen, Hungarian more still. English retains case only in its pronouns ('he' / 'him' / 'his'), which is why the concept feels foreign to English speakers.
Related terms
- NounBeginner — A word for a thing, person, place, idea or quality.
- SubjectBeginner — The part of a clause that the verb agrees with — usually who or what performs the action.
- ObjectBeginner — The part of a clause that the action is done to.
- Word orderIntermediate — The order in which subject, verb and object normally appear.
- Morphosyntactic alignmentAdvanced — How a language groups the subject of an intransitive verb with either the subject or the object of a transitive one.
Where to go next
- Language guides — See grammatical and lexical categories used in context.
- Terminology quiz — Test the terms on this page.