German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

articles are used similarly to the

English articles The articles in English are the definite article '' the'' and the indefinite articles '' a'' and ''an''. They are the two most common determiners. The definite article is the default determiner when the speaker believes that the listener kn ...

, ''a'' and ''the''. However, they are declined differently according to the

number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...

gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...

and

case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...

of their nouns.

Declension

The inflected forms depend on the number, the case and the gender of the corresponding noun. German articleslike adjectives and pronounshave the same plural forms for all three genders.

Indefinite article

This article, ''ein-'', is used equivalently to the word ''a'' in English. Like its English equivalent (though unlike Spanish), it has no direct form for a plural; in this situation a range of alternatives such as ''einige'' (some; several) or ''manche'' (some) would be used. The same endings are used for the negative indefinite article-like word (''kein-''), and the adjectival possessive pronouns (alias: possessive adjectives, possessive determiners), ''mein-'' (my), ''dein-'' (your ''(singular)''), ''sein-'' (his), ''ihr-'' (her and their), ''unser-'' (our), ''euer/eur-'' (your ''(plural)''), ''Ihr-'' (your if addressing an authority figure, always capitalised).

Definite article

This table gives endings for the definite article, equivalent to English ''the''. The so-called "der words" (''Der-Wort'') take similar endings. Examples are demonstrative pronouns (''dies-'', ''jen-'') (this, that), the relative pronoun (''welch-'') (which), ''jed-'' (every), ''manch-'' (many), ''solch-'' (such). * This is essentially the same as the indefinite article table, but with the masculine nominative -er, and the neuter nominative and accusative -es. For further details as to the usage of German cases, see

German grammar The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages. Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that o ...

References

{{reflist Articles Articles