Slovene declension

This page describes the declension of nouns, adjectives and pronouns in Slovene. For information on Slovene grammar in general, see Slovene grammar.

Nouns are declined for six cases and three numbers. Adjectives and most pronouns additionally decline for three genders.

There are six cases (the Slovene names are given in brackets):

Traditionally, the cases are given in the order above. They are also usually numbered accordingly: the nominative case is the first case, the genitive the second, and so on. For convenience, this article lists the accusative between the nominative and genitive.

Slovene has three numbers:

A noun in Slovene can have one of the following three genders:

Most nouns contain distinct forms for each combination of case and number. Adjectives have distinct forms for each combination of case, number and gender. The dual and plural are not distinguished in the genitive and locative cases. In the dual and plural of adjectives, only the nominative and accusative cases distinguish the genders, the other dual and plural case forms are the same in all three genders.

The declensions for nouns can be split by gender, as gender and declension pattern normally coincide. However, some nouns of one gender follow the declension of another gender, so this is not an absolute rule.

Every declensional class has a small subset of nouns following the so-called "mobile accent" paradigm. These nouns have the accent on the ending in some of the forms, in particular in the genitive singular, and some of the endings may also be different. The mobile paradigms were inherited from Common Slavic, where they were more numerous. In modern Slovene, they are best treated as irregular because there are relatively few of them, but the declensional patterns are usually still regular enough to consider them as cohesive subclasses. Most nouns with mobile accent are commonly used, which has helped to preserve them.

There are also a few nouns with a stressed fill vowel (/ə/ or occasionally /a/) in the last syllable of the stem. These usually shifted the accent onto the ending in most forms, but are different from mobile-accent nouns in that the endings have a short vowel, whereas mobile-accent nouns mostly have long vowels in the ending.

Masculine nouns typically end in a consonant, these are the hard and soft masculine "o-stem" nouns. Some masculine nouns end in a vowel, but these are rare.

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