German nouns

German nouns are always capitalised (for example 'the book' is always "das Buch"), and may be created by joining multiple individual words together. (For example, "spy satellite" is "Spionagesatellit" in German.) As in many related Indo-European languages, nouns in German have a grammatical gender: masculine, feminine, or neuter, even words for objects without masculine or feminine characteristics like 'bridge' or 'rock'. They are also 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. Masculine and neuter nouns are declined when in the genitive case, and some also in the dative and (less commonly) accusative cases.

German plurals are normally formed by adding -en or -er to the noun. Recent loanwords from English often keep the -s plural ending. Some nouns also change a vowel when in the plural form:

• Der Mann (sg.) - Die Männer (pl.) ("the man" - "the men")

This effect, part of the Germanic umlaut process, was once almost universal in English, but now only survives in some irregular plurals such as 'feet' as the plural of 'foot' and 'mice' as the plural of 'mouse'.

Declension for case

For the four cases, nominative, accusative, dative and genitive, the main forms of declension are:

For singular nouns:

I: Feminine nouns have the same form in all four cases.
die Frau, die Frau, der Frau, der Frau

II: Personal names, All neuter and most masculine nouns have genitive case '-(e)s' endings: normally '-es' if one syllable long, '-s' if more. This is related to using 's to show possession in English, e.g. 'The boy's book'. Traditionally the nouns in this group also add -e in the dative case, but this is now often ignored.
der Mann, den Mann, dem Mann(e), des Mann(e)s
das Kind, das Kind, dem Kind(e), des Kind(e)s

III: The n-nouns take -(e)n for genitive, dative and accusative: this is used for masculine nouns ending with -e and a few others, mostly animate nouns.
a) der Drache, den Drachen, dem Drachen, des Drachen
b) der Prinz, den Prinzen, dem Prinzen, des Prinzen

IV: A few masculine weak nouns take (e)n for accusative and dative, and -(e)ns for genitive.
a) der Buchstabe, den Buchstaben, dem Buchstaben, des Buchstabens
b) der Glaube, den Glauben, dem Glauben, 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) die Kinder, die Kinder, den Kindern, der Kinder
b) die Frauen, die Frauen, den Frauen, der Frauen

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 in all feminine nouns, all singular forms are identical.
• 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 dative cases. A small class of mostly masculine nouns called "weak nouns" takes the ending -n or -en in all cases except the nominative.

Dative forms with the ending -e (dem Gotte, dem Manne) are restricted to formal usage, but widely limited to poetic style. Such forms are not commonly found in modern texts, except in fixed expressions (such as im Stande sein "to be able"). Nevertheless, in the genitive, the ending -es must be used in most monosyllabic words (des Gottes, des Mannes). Only words of more syllables usually add a simple -s (des Königs).

In colloquial usage, moreover, singular inflection of weak masculine nouns may be limited to those ending in -e (der Name – dem Namen). Other nouns of this class are often not inflected. Thus one is very likely to hear dem Spatz, dem Idiot instead of the formally correct dem Spatzen, dem Idioten.

Declension classes

Irregular declensions

Many foreign nouns have irregular plurals, for example:

Orthography

All German nouns are capitalized. This applies even to infinitives used as nouns. It should be noted that in German there is a technical distinction, one that is not widely known even among native speakers, between Substantive and Nomen. The former are noncomparable nouns to be used with an article, are capitalized, while the latter class, which includes adjectives, may not be.

For compound nouns (such as Apfelbaum) only capitalize the beginning (Apfel) and not the second word (Baum) or any following words:
Farbfernsehgerät — color television set.

Compounds

German allows the composition of nominal stems into tatpurusha compounds, in effectively unlimited numbers, as in "Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" (the name of an actual law passed in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 1999), and "Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft" (a constructed example used to illustrate the principle. It is derived from the name of the real "Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaft", the "Danube Steamboat Shipping Company", 1829).

This works similar to English apposition, but the German compound is used as a single word: "spy satellite" equals "Spionagesatellit" and "mad cow syndrome" equals "Rinderwahnsinn".

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 (c.f. Idafa), but it occurs frequently after nouns which do not actually take an "s" in their genitive cases. The "s" is actually inserted for ease in pronunciation, most of the time. For example: das Verkehrsflugzeug = airliner or commercial aircraft, where without the "s", the pronunciation would be difficult.

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, but rather from the issue of pronunciation 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 (of the first stem); words in "tum, -ling, -ion, -tät, -heit, -keit, -schaft, -sicht, -ung" and nominalized infinitives in "-en" mostly do take the "s", while feminine words 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.^[1]

Common false friends

As in English, some nouns (mass nouns) only have a singular form (singularia tantum); other nouns only have a plural form (pluralia tantum):

• Das All, der Durst, der Sand ("the Universe", "thirst", "sand")
• Die Kosten, die Ferien ("costs", "the holidays")

Traps abound in both directions here: common mass nouns in English are not mass nouns in German, and vice versa:

• information — Information, die Information ("the piece of information")

"die Informationen" ("the pieces of information")

• the police are (pl.) = die Polizei ist (sg.)

Again as in English, some words change their meaning when changing their number:

• Geld ("money") - Gelder ("different sources of money")
• Wein ("wine") - die Weine ("different types of wine")

A few words have two different plurals with distinct meanings. For example:

• Wort ("word") - Wörter (isolated words, as in "five words") - Worte (connected, meaningful words, as in "his last words")
• Band - Bande ("bonds") - Bänder ("ribbons")
• Bau - Bauten ("buildings") - Baue ("burrows")

Some words share the singular and can only be distinguished by their genus and sometimes their plural:

• Gehalt - das Gehalt/ die Gehälter ("salary") - der Gehalt/ die Gehalte ("content")
• Band - das Band/ die Bänder ("ribbon") - der Band/ die Bände ("bibliographic volume")
• Teil - das Teil/ die Teile (physical "piece" e.g. from a machine) - der Teil/ die Teile (conceptual "part" e.g. from a speech)
• See - der See/ die Seen ("lake") - die See ("sea", no plural form) - die See/ die Seen (nautical term for "(large) wave")

References

See also

• German grammar

External links

For a list of words relating to German nouns, see the German nouns category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• German Nouns and Gender – German grammar lesson covering nouns and gender