German nouns


German nouns have a grammatical gender, as in many related Indo-European languages. They can be masculine, feminine, or neuter: even words for objects without masculine or feminine characteristics like 'bridge' or 'rock' can be masculine or feminine. German nouns are also declined depending on their grammatical case and whether they are singular or plural. German has four cases, nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.
German, along with other High German languages, such as Luxembourgish, is unusual among languages using the Latin alphabet in that all nouns, both proper and common, are capitalized. Only a handful of other languages generally capitalize their nouns, mainly regional languages with orthographical conventions inspired by German such as Saterland Frisian. Noun compounds are written together.
German plurals are normally formed by adding -e, -en, -er or nothing to the noun, sometimes also a vowel is changed, the so-called umlaut. Recent loanwords from French and English often keep the -s plural ending.

Declension for case

N-nouns: A masculine or neuter noun with genitive singular and nominative plural ending in -n is called an n-noun or weak noun. 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.

nom. die Frau, acc. die Frau, dat. der Frau, gen. der Frau

Exceptions are:
II: Personal names, all neuter and most masculine nouns have genitive case -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.

nom. der Mann, acc. den Mann, dat. dem Mann', gen. des Manns

nom. das Kind, acc. das Kind, dat. dem Kind', gen. des Kinds.
III: Masculine and neuter n-nouns take -n for genitive, dative and accusative: this is used for masculine nouns ending with -e denoting people and animals, masculine nouns ending with -and, -ant, -ent, -ist, mostly denoting people, and a few others, mostly animate nouns.

a) nom. der Drache, acc. den Drachen, dat. dem Drachen, gen. des Drachen

b) nom. der Prinz, acc. den Prinzen, dat. dem Prinzen, gen. des Prinzen.
IV: A few masculine nouns take -n for accusative and dative, and -ns for genitive.

a) nom. der Buchstabe, acc. den Buchstaben, dat. dem Buchstaben, gen. des Buchstabens

b) nom. der Glaube, acc. den Glauben, dat. dem Glauben, gen. des Glaubens.
For plural nouns:

V: In the dative case, all nouns which do not already have an -n or -s ending add -n.

a) nom. die Kinder, acc. die Kinder, dat. den Kindern, gen. der Kinder

b) nom. die Frauen, acc. die Frauen, dat. den Frauen, gen. der Frauen.

General rules of declension

Dative forms with the ending -e, known in German as the Dativ-e 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 and for certain words 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.
In colloquial usage, moreover, singular inflection of weak masculine nouns may be limited to those ending in -e. Other nouns of this class are sometimes not inflected. Thus one might occasionally hear dem Spatz, dem Idiot instead of the more formal dem Spatzen, dem Idioten.

Declension classes

Irregular declensions

the heartSingularPlural
Nominativedas Herzdie Herzen
Accusativedas Herzdie Herzen
Dativedem Herzen*den Herzen
Genitivedes Herzensder Herzen

Many foreign nouns have irregular plurals, for example:
Nominative singularGenitive singularNominative pluralMeaning
-s, -endas Themades Themasdie Thementhe theme
-s, PLdas Themades Themasdie Thematathe theme
-, -ender Amerikanismusdes Amerikanismusdie Amerikanismenthe Americanism
-, PLder Modusdes Modusdie Modithe mode or mood

Orthography

All German nouns are capitalized. German is the only major language to capitalize its nouns. This was also done in the Danish language until 1948 and sometimes in 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.

Compounds

As in other Germanic languages, German nouns can be compound in effectively unlimited numbers,
as in Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, or Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft.
Unlike English compounds, German compound nouns are always written together as a single word: "spy satellite" is thus Spionagesatellit and "mad cow disease" Rinderwahn. Compound nouns take the gender of the last component noun.
In addition, there is the grammatical feature of the Fugen-"s": certain compounds introduce an "s" between the noun stems, historically marking the genitive case of the first noun, but it occurs frequently after nouns which do not actually 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. Hochzeitskleid = "wedding dress", Liebeslied = "love song", Abfahrtszeit = "time of departure", Arbeitsamt = "employment agency".
Occurrence of the Fugen-"s" seems to be correlated to certain suffixes ; compounds with words in -tum, -ling, -ion, -tät, -heit, -keit, -schaft, -sicht, -ung and nominalized infinitives in -en mostly do take the "s", while feminine words not ending in -ion, -tät, -heit, -keit, -schaft, -sicht, -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.
To reduce length or to highlight distinctions, a prefix or suffix is sometimes mentioned only once but applies to more than one compound noun. For example:
As in English, some nouns only have a singular form ; other nouns only have a plural form :
Traps abound in both directions here: common mass nouns in English
are 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: