Grammatical Cases in Arabic

Introduction

مُقَدِّمَة

Cases describe the grammatical functions of nouns, pronouns and noun phrases, such as whether they are the subject of the clause or a subordinate object.

Nominative Case

الحالة الاسمية

The nominative case, also called the subjective, marks the subject of a phrase. The subject is the noun (or pronoun) that performs the action of the verb. For example, in the phrase "She helped him", the subject is "she", who performs the action of helping.

Accusative Case

المفعول به

The accusative case deals with direct objects. In English for example, in the sentence "I drink coffee", the direct object is "coffee", and thus it is in the accusative case.

It is sometimes called the oblique case, especially when combined with the dative case.

Genitive Case

صيغة المضاف اليه

Also called the possessive case, the genitive case marks objects as pertaining or belonging to another object. For example, in the phrase "it is mine", the pronoun "mine" is in the genitive case.