In linguistics, declension is the occurrence of inflection in nouns, pronouns, articles, and adjectives, indicating such features as number (typically singular vs. plural), case (subject, object, and so on), gender, and possession. Declension occurs in a great many of the world's languages, but is much less prominent in English. English nouns decline only to distinguish singular from plural (e.g., book vs. books); As detailed below, English was once a highly inflected language, as befitting its Indo-European and especially its Germanic linguistic ancestry, but it became greatly simplified as it evolved. In Modern English, nouns have distinct singular and plural forms; that is, they decline to reflect their grammatical number. (Consider the difference between book and books.) In addition, a small number of English pronouns have distinct nominative and objective forms; that is, they decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or preposition.
