Grammatical case

Case is a grammatical category whose value reflects the grammatical function performed by a noun or pronoun in a phrase, clause, or sentence. In some languages, nouns, pronouns, and their modifiers take different inflected forms depending on what case they are in. English has largely lost its case system, although case distinctions can still be seen with the personal pronouns: forms such as I, he and we are used in the role of subject ("I kicked the ball"), whereas forms such as me, him and us are used in the role of object ("John kicked me").

Languages such as Ancient Greek, Armenian, Latin, Sanskrit, Hungarian, Turkish, Tamil, Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Slovak, Finnish, Icelandic, Latvian and Lithuanian have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different suffixes) to indicate their case. A language may have a number of different cases (Turkish and Romanian have five, Latin and Russian each have at least six; Armenian, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Latvian, and Lithuanian have seven; Finnish has fifteen and Hungarian has eighteen). Commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. A role that one of these languages marks by case will often be marked in English using a preposition. For example, the English prepositional phrase with (his) foot (as in "John kicked the ball with his foot") might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case, or in Ancient Greek as τῷ ποδί, tōi podi, meaning "the foot" with both words (the definite article, and the noun πούς, pous, "foot") changing to dative form.