Noun Declension

Russian being a declined language, cases play a major role in the language.

Beyond the actual declinations and their construction there is their application, use and meaning, this is as important.

Cases

Modern Russian operate with 6+ cases depending on definition and who you ask. The normally given list is the following:

• Nominative
• Genitive
• Accusative
• Dative
• Prepositional

In addition to these one might also mention:

• Locative: separate prepositional form for use with в/на
• Partive genitive: genitive-ish in -у used for partives
• Vocative: aged and not used except for in set phrases
• Modern vocative: A relatively recent and quite personal vocative form

Grammatical categories

Nouns change for number: singular, plural.

Nouns change for case, as noted above.

Nouns have one of three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter.

Nouns are commonly sorted in three declinations/classes that attempt to systemise the formation of their declinations.

• I: first declension
  • masculines: -consonant, -й, -ь
  • neuters: -о, -е
• II: second declension
  • feminines: -а, -я
• III: third declension
  • feminines: -ь (≈2/3 of declension)
  • masculines: -ь (≈1/3 of declension)

On top of the nouns having gender and changing for number and case we could add stress pattern type to the system to try to engulf that aspect of Russian nouns too.

Soft / Hard

Another very important aspect of the structure of the Russian language is the soft/hard dichotomy rendering pairs of consonants and their palatalisations of contrasive importance.

Using this dimension one might also sort the declensions into hard and soft subtypes instead of primarily by gender:

• I: soft and hard
• II: soft and hard
• III: soft

This is useful since endings are mostly shared within a subtype of hard or soft masculines neuters in the first declension.