EIN: The Dative Case

The Dative Case

So far you have learned two cases in German, the nominative case, used for subjects in a sentence, and the accusative case, used for direct objects and nouns or pronouns following accusative prepositions like für. Now, you will be introduced to a third case, the dative case. This case is needed for indirect objects in a sentence and for nouns or pronouns following dative prepositions like mit or zu.

As we learned earlier, the case system in German is unlike anything we have in English, where the definite article "the" is always "the" and "a" or "an" never change as indefinite articles. Not so in German. The case system exists to distinguish between genders of nouns or pronouns and to indicate a word's grammatical function in a sentence.  

Thus, if we counter the male noun for the man - der Mann - it may appear as der Mann, den Mann or dem Mann in a sentence, but once we understand the case system, and the needed changes to the forms of articles, we also understand the grammatical function of words more clearly in a German sentence and recognize that der signals a nominative subject, den signals the accusative direct object, and dem signals the dative indirect object.

Before we proceed further into deconstructing the dative case, it is essential to understand the difference between direct and indirect objects in an English or German sentence.

Let's look at an example:

The sentence contains a subject, I, an indirect object, my father, and a direct object, a hat. How can you know which one is which? A direct object is always the word that will answer the question "what" when it is attached to the verb, so in the above example "what" is being given? A hat. And who receives the hat? My father. So, the indirect object, defined, is always the receiver of the direct object.

The Dative in German

In German that same sentence above would be...

• Ich schenke* meinem Vater einen Hut zum Vatertag.
  • meinem Vater = Dative
  • einen Hut = Accusative
  • *Note: schenken, not geben, is the preferred verb here when giving is meant as gifting.

What must be noted in the German sentence is that the indirect object, which should come before the direct object in proper syntax (word order), must take the dative case, while the direct object will take the accusative case.

You have previously learned that direct objects must use the accusative case and that this affected only the articles of masculine nouns or masculine pronouns, making them change from der to den or ein to einen. Now, when we also employ the dative case, all genders change their article forms in the dative case.

In the dative case masculine articles become dem/einem, feminine become der/einer, and neuter articles change to dem/einem (same as masculine forms); plural nouns change to den in the dative. The illustration below summarizes these changes:

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