What is the Nominative case in the Russian language?

We’ve already written a brief explanation about what cases are and how many there are in Russian, which you can read here.

To briefly recap: A case is a grammatical category that determines the role of certain parts of speech in a sentence, expresses their relationship to one another and conveys the meaning of what is said. This is often accomplished by word order in other languages.

A case applies to nominals: nouns and pronouns and the adjectives, numerals and participles that depend on them. They are declined by case, which means the ending of the word changes.

The ‘nominative’ case is the default case. Nouns in the nominative case are the subjects of an action and express the role of the subject in a sentence: «Лето пришло» ("Summer has come")

Sometimes, a noun in the nominative case can also be a predicate: «Москва – столица России» ("Moscow is the capital of Russia").  

The nominative case answers the questions «кто? что?» ( "who?" or "what?") for nouns and pronouns, «какой? какая? какое? Какие?» ("what kind?" masculine/feminine/neuter/plural) for adjectives and participles and «сколько?» ("how much/many?") for numerals.

Here is an example using three types of declensions.

If you want to learn more about the cases and Russian grammar, make sure you sign up to our free Russian language course!