The Case System: A Summer Refresher

Whether you’re studying for a qualification, going on a work event, planning a holiday to a German-speaking country, or just learning for fun, all German learners will come across the case system at some stage. Shiver. For many, the case system is a baffling, complex grammatical feature, which fogs up the mind, and makes the meaning of a sentence hard to understand. In this week’s post, I’m going to try and clear away some of that mind fog, and provide you with some tips and tricks to help get your head around the cases.

What even is a case system?

In short, a case system is the way in which we can identify the function or meaning of a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase in a sentence. In the same way as we conjugate verbs in different tenses, we can decline nouns in different cases, to show their role in a clause. In many languages, this is standard practice – anyone who’s studied Latin will know the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and vocative cases. In fact, there are several languages each with four or six cases, and there are some with even more than that. There’s even one northeast Caucasian language which (allegedly) has 64 cases!

So what cases does German have?

You’ll be relieved to hear that German has nowhere near as many cases as some other Indo-European languages. German only uses four: the nominative, accusative, genitive and dative, and all German articles, adjectives, nouns and pronouns have a separate form in each of these cases. These are all syntactic cases, meaning they are used to demonstrate the function of particular words in a sentence, rather than impacting their meaning. The uses of these four cases are outlined below.

1) The Nominative Case

Most case systems, and certainly all that I’ve ever come across, have a nominative case. This is your typical “dictionary form” of a noun – in much the same way as the infinitive of a verb. In German, the nominative is used to name (the word “nominative” comes from the Latin, nomen) or identify a noun. You may hear it described as the case used for the subject or the actor of a verb – although this isn’t always a reliable definition; occasionally other nouns in a sentence might take the nominative case. In German, for example, nouns following the copular verbs (sein, werden, bleiben) remain in the nominative case, even though they are not the subject.

2) The Accusative Case

Again, most languages with case systems have an accusative case, and German is no exception. The forms of the accusative case only differ very slightly from those in the nominative case – with the exception of personal pronouns, which are a bit random anyway. The accusative is mostly used to complement the nominative: nouns which serve as the direct object of a sentence are declined into the accusative case. There are also some specific linguistic settings in which the accusative case is mandatory in German, for example after the accusative prepositions (für, um, durch, gegen, entlang, bis, ohne, wider – collectively known as FUDGE BOW), or where physical motion is implied by the verb or preposition (Ich gehe ins Kino).

3) The Genitive Case

The genitive case is the only one fully remaining in the English language, other than the nominative, where it can be seen in situations where an apostrophe is used to show possession. For example, Mothers’ Day is the Day of the Mothers. The genitive case has a similar usage in German: it’s mainly used to demonstrate possession, although it can also be used in other instances where the preposition von (of) might otherwise be used, e.g. to describe authorship, nationality, or opinion. The genitive is also used following certain prepositions, such as während, dank, and wegen. It’s worth noting that outside of academic studies, the genitive case is decreasing in popularity in informal language. Often, German speakers will use von to avoid the genitive if they can.

4) The Dative Case

The dative is probably the case which is least familiar to native English speakers, because we do not use it at all. It has undergone a process of syncretism, and has merged entirely with our accusative case. In German, however, the dative is still very much a key aspect of grammar. It’s mainly used to show location or placement, if there is no implied motion. The dative usually follows a preposition of some kind (in, auf, vor), but is also used for the indirect object of a verb – that is, the thing the verb is impacting, but not acting on. An easy way to identify the indirect object is if there’s an implied “to” in the phrase: mir, uns, Ihnen for “to me”, “to us”, “to you (form.)”.

I hope that’s given you enough of a refresher of the case system to keep you on your toes over the summer. If you don’t have the opportunity – or motivation – to practise using them, it can be easy to forget your accusative prepositions, or your indirect object pronouns. As such, I highly recommend you go over your case endings every now and again, to keep them fresh in your head. Try to find examples in German-language media such as newspaper articles (try Die Zeit) if you can. And if you need it, here you can find my handy document showing the case inflections (endings) of articles and adjectives in German. You may also want to revise the changes to pronouns in the four cases – unfortunately they’re not so straightforward!