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.
Declension for case
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: ). 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:
For singular nouns
I: Feminine nouns usually have the same form in all four cases. a) nom. , acc. , dat. , gen.
Exceptions are: Old declensions like with genitive and dative singular (in older usage) Words derived from Latin with nominative singular in -a and genitive singular (in older usage) Proper nouns derived from Latin: (“Mary” in English) with genitive singular and . Proper nouns which have two genitive forms like (“Brunhild's spear”) and (“the spear of Brunhild”). The words which have forms like , but also .
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. , acc. , dat. , gen. b) nom. , acc. , dat. , gen. .
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 (mostly denoting people), and a few others (mostly animate nouns). a) nom. , acc. , dat. , gen. b) nom. , acc. , dat. , gen. .
IV: A few masculine nouns take -(e)n for accusative and dative, and -(e)ns for genitive. a) nom. , acc. , dat. , gen. b) nom. , acc. , dat. , gen. .
For plural nouns
I: In the dative case, all nouns which do not already have an -n or -s ending add -n. a) nom. , acc. , dat. , gen. b) nom. , acc. , dat. , gen.
General rules of declension
Given the nominative singular, genitive singular, and nominative plural of a noun, it is possible to determine its declension. Note that for most feminine nouns, all singular forms are identical. This means that since n-nouns in general have all plural forms identical, all feminine n-nouns are effectively indeclinable. The dative plural of all nouns ends in -n if such an ending does not already exist, except that of nouns that form the plural with -s, which are usually loan words. Most nouns do not take declensions in the accusative or singular dative cases. A class of masculine nouns, called "weak nouns," takes the ending -n or -en in all cases except the nominative.
Dative forms with the ending -e, known in German as the 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 : "to be able") and for certain words (e.g. or ) 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.