Grammatical case
Case is a grammatical category whose value reflects the grammatical function performed by a noun or pronoun in a phrase, clause, or sentence. In some languages, nouns, pronouns and their modifiers take different inflected forms depending on what case they are in. English has largely lost its case system, although case distinctions can still be seen with the personal pronouns: forms such as
I,
he and
we are used in the role of subject, while forms such as
me,
him and
us are used in the role of object. Languages such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Tamil, Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Finnish have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners all inflecting to indicate their case. A language may have a number of different cases. Commonly encountered cases include nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. A role that one of these languages marks by case will often be marked in English using a preposition.