Lithuanian Declension

Lithuanian declension is quite sophisticated in a way similar to declensions in ancient Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Latin or Ancient Greek. It also is one of the most complicated declension systems among modern Indo-European and modern European languages.

Traditionally, scholars count up to ten case forms in Lithuanian. However at least one case is reduced to adverbs, and another is extinct in the modern language. So the official variant of Lithuanian has seven cases, and an eighth case is used in some dialects and reduced to an adverb in others. The main cases are:

• nominative (vardininkas): used to identify the inflection type
• genitive (kilmininkas): used to identify the inflection type
• dative (naudininkas)
• accusative (galininkas)
• instrumental (įnagininkas)
• locative (vietininkas)
• vocative (šauksmininkas)

The other cases are:

• illative: dialectal
• allative: reduced to adverbs
• adessive †

Lithuanian has two main grammatical numbers: singular and plural. There is also a dual, which is almost unused, except few words, that retain their dual forms. Although grammatically the dual number can be applied to any word, in practice it was used quite sporadically during the last century. The singular and the plural are used similarly to many European languages. Singular, plural and dual inflections of the same case always differ among themselves and there's no rule, how to make, for example, the plural inflection from the singular of the same case.