The nouns of the German language have several properties, some unique. As in many related Indo-European languages, German nouns possess a grammatical gender; the three genders are masculine, feminine, and neuter. Words for objects without obvious masculine or feminine characteristics like 'bridge' or 'rock' can be masculine or feminine. German nouns are declined (change form) depending on their grammatical case (their function in a sentence) and whether they are singular or plural. German has four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.
German is unusual among languages using the Latin alphabet in that all nouns are capitalized (for example, "the book" is always written as "das Buch"). Other High German languages, such as Luxembourgish, also capitalize both proper and common nouns. Only a handful of other languages capitalize their nouns, mainly regional languages with orthographic conventions inspired by German, such as Low German and Saterland Frisian. Under the influence of German, the Scandinavian languages formerly capitalized their nouns; Danish retained the habit until 1948.
Noun compounds are written together with no spacing (for example, the German word for "spy satellite" is "Spionagesatellit"). Plurals are normally formed by adding -e, -en, -er (or nothing) to the noun, and sometimes a vowel is also changed (the so-called umlaut). Moreover, recent loanwords from French and English often keep the -s plural ending.
N-noun:
A masculine or neuter noun with genitive singular and nominative plural ending in -(e)n is called an n-noun or weak noun (German: German: schwaches Substantiv). Sometimes these terms are extended to feminine nouns with genitive singular and nominative plural -en.
For the four cases, nominative, accusative, dative and genitive, the main forms of declension are:
I: Feminine nouns usually have the same form in all four cases.
a) nom., acc. German: die Frau, dat., gen. German: der Frau
Exceptions are:
II: Personal names, all neuter and most masculine nouns have genitive case -(e)s endings: normally -es if one syllable long, -s if more. Traditionally the nouns in this group also add -e in the dative case, but this is now often ignored.
a) nom. German: der Mann, acc. German: den Mann, dat. German: dem Mann'''(e)''', gen. German: des Mann'''(e)s'''
b) nom. German: das Kind, acc. German: das Kind, dat. German: dem Kind'''(e)''', gen. German: des Kind'''(e)s'''.
III: Masculine and neuter n-nouns take -(e)n for genitive, dative and accusative: this is used for masculine nouns ending with -e denoting people and animals, masculine nouns ending with German: -and, -ant, -ent, -ist (mostly denoting people), and a few others (mostly animate nouns).
a) nom. German: der Drache, acc. German: den Drache'''n''', dat. German: dem Drache'''n''', gen. German: des Drache'''n'''
b) nom. German: der Prinz, acc. German: den Prinz'''en''', dat. German: dem Prinz'''en''', gen. German: des Prinz'''en'''.
IV: A few masculine nouns take -(e)n for accusative and dative, and -(e)ns for genitive.
a) nom. German: der Buchstabe, acc. German: den Buchstabe'''n''', dat. German: dem Buchstabe'''n''', gen. German: des Buchstabe'''ns'''
b) nom. German: der Glaube, acc. German: den Glaube'''n''', dat. German: dem Glaube'''n''', gen. German: des Glaube'''ns'''.
I: In the dative case, all nouns which do not already have an -n or -s ending add -n.
a) nom., acc. German: die Kinder, dat. German: den Kinder'''n''', gen. German: der Kinder
b) nom., acc. German: die Frauen, dat. German: den Frauen, gen. German: der Frauen.
Dative forms with the ending -e, known in German as the German: Dativ-e (dem Gotte, dem Manne) are mostly restricted to formal usage, but widely limited to poetic style. Such forms are not commonly found in modern prose texts, except in fixed expressions (such as German: im Stande sein: "to be able") and for certain words (e.g. German: (dem) Hause, Wege or German: Tode) which are, however, quite numerous; in these cases, omitting the -e would be similarly unusual. This ending is also still used semi-productively in poetry and music, mostly for the purposes of meter and rhyme.
Nevertheless, in the genitive, the ending -es is used …
Only words of more syllables usually add a simple -s German: (des Königs).
In colloquial usage, moreover, singular inflection of weak masculine nouns may be limited to those ending in -e German: (der Name – dem Name'''n'''). Other nouns of this class are sometimes not inflected. Thus one might occasionally hear German: dem Spatz, dem Idiot instead of the more formal German: dem Spatzen, dem Idioten.
| Number | Singular | Plural | Example | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | Accusative | Dative | Genitive | NominativeAccusative | Dative | Genitive | |||
| Article (M, N, F) | der, das, die | den, das, die | dem, dem, der | des, des, der | die | den | der | ||
| -(e)s, -e | Berg | Berg | Berg(e) | Berg(e)s | Berge | Bergen | Berge | der Berg, des Berg(e)s, die Berge | |
| -(e)s, -er | Bild | Bild | Bild(e) | Bild(e)s | Bilder | Bildern | Bilder | das Bild, des Bild(e)s, die Bilder | |
| -(e)s, -en | Staat | Staat | Staat(e) | Staat(e)s | Staaten | Staaten | Staaten | der Staat, des Staat(e)s, die Staaten | |
| -s, - | Fahrer | Fahrer | Fahrer | Fahrers | Fahrer | Fahrern | Fahrer | der Fahrer, des Fahrers, die Fahrer | |
| -s, -e | Lehrling | Lehrling | Lehrling | Lehrlings | Lehrlinge | Lehrlingen | Lehrlinge | der Lehrling, des Lehrlings, die Lehrlinge | |
| -s, -s | Radio | Radio | Radio | Radios | Radios | Radios | Radios | das Radio, des Radios, die Radios | |
| -en, -en | Student | Studenten | Studenten | Studenten | Studenten | Studenten | Studenten | der Student, des Studenten, die Studenten | |
| -, -̈ | Mutter | Mutter | Mutter | Mutter | Mütter | Müttern | Mütter | die Mutter, der Mutter, die Mütter | |
| -, -en | Meinung | Meinung | Meinung | Meinung | Meinungen | Meinungen | Meinungen | die Meinung, der Meinung, die Meinungen | |
| -, -̈e | Kraft | Kraft | Kraft | Kraft | Kräfte | Kräften | Kräfte | die Kraft, der Kraft, die Kräfte | |
| -, -s | Kamera | Kamera | Kamera | Kamera | Kameras | Kameras | Kameras | die Kamera, der Kamera, die Kameras | |
| -ns, -n | Name | Namen | Namen | Namens | Namen | Namen | Namen | der Name, des Namens, die Namen | |
| Nominative | der Herr | die Herren | |
| Accusative | den Herrn | die Herren | |
| Dative | dem Herrn | den Herren | |
| Genitive | des Herrn | der Herren |
| Nominative | das Herz | die Herzen | |
| Accusative | das Herz | die Herzen | |
| Dative | dem Herzen* | den Herzen | |
| Genitive | des Herzens | der Herzen |
Many foreign nouns have irregular plurals, for example:
| Nominative singular | Genitive singular | Nominative plural | Meaning | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| -s, -en | das Thema | des Themas | die Themen | the theme | |
| -s, PL | die Themata | ||||
| -, -en | der Amerikanismus | des Amerikanismus | die Amerikanismen | the Americanism | |
| -, PL | der Modus | des Modus | die Modi | the mode or mood |
All German nouns are capitalized.[1] German is the only major language to capitalize its nouns. This was also done in the Danish language until 1948 and sometimes in (New) Latin, while Early Modern English showed tendencies towards noun capitalization.
Capitalization is not restricted to nouns. Other words are often capitalized when they are nominalized (for instance German: das Deutsche ‘the German language’, a nominalized adjective).
As in other Germanic languages, German nouns can be compound in effectively unlimited numbers, as in German: [[Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz]] ('Cattle Marking and Beef Labelling Supervision Duties Delegation Law', the name of an actual law passed in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 1999), or German: [[Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft]] ('Danube Steamboat Shipping Company', 1829).
Unlike English compounds, German compound nouns are usually written together as a single word: 'spy satellite' is thus German: Spionagesatellit and 'mad cow disease' German: Rinderwahn. Compound nouns take the gender of the last component noun (the head). In special cases, German compounds are hyphenated, as in US-Botschaft ‚US embassy‘, or 100-prozentig ‚with a 100 percent‘.
In addition, there is the grammatical feature of the German: Fugen-"s": certain compounds introduce an "s" between the noun stems, historically marking the genitive case of the first noun (cf. iḍāfah), but it occurs frequently after nouns which do not take an "s" in their genitive cases.
In many instances, the compound is acceptable both with and without the "s", but there are many cases where the "s" is mandatory and this cannot be deduced from grammatical rules, e.g. German: Hochzeitskleid = "wedding dress", German: Liebeslied = "love song", German: Abfahrtszeit = "time of departure", German: Arbeitsamt = "employment agency".
Occurrence of the German: Fugen-"s" seems to be correlated to certain suffixes (of the first stem); compounds with words in German: -tum, German: -ling, German: -ion, German: -tät, German: -heit, German: -keit, German: -schaft, German: -sicht, German: -ung and nominalized infinitives in German: -en mostly do take the "s", while feminine words not ending in German: -ion, German: -tät, German: -heit, German: -keit, German: -schaft, German: -sicht, German: -ung mostly do not, but there are exceptions. Use of the "s" is mostly optional in compounds in which the second element is a participle.[2]
To reduce length or to highlight distinctions, a first or final part of a compound is sometimes mentioned only once but applies to more than one compound noun. For example:
As in English, some nouns (e.g. mass nouns) only have a singular form (singularia tantum); other nouns only have a plural form (pluralia tantum):
Traps abound in both directions here: common mass nouns in Englishare not mass nouns in German, and vice versa:
Again as in English, some words change their meaning when changing their number:
A few words have two different plurals with distinct meanings. For example:
Some words share the singular and can only be distinguished by their gender and sometimes their plural (compare “bases” in English, which can be the plural of two distinct words, “base” and “basis”):