Grammatical Cases in Dutch

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.

Since the middle ages, Dutch has progressively lost its case system, unlike German which has retained high degree inflection throughout its determiners and adjectives. Dutch, like English, differentiates personal pronouns based on the nominative ("he", "she") and oblique case ("him", "her"), though historically it had accusative, dative and genitive cases like German, as well as distinct forms for each gender and number.

Certain adjectives in Modern Dutch, such as the possessive adjectives, have both an inflected and non-inflected form, which are relics of case distinction but follow rules beyond agent-action relationships.