Cases

English marks a word’s grammatical role mostly through word order and prepositions — "the boy sees the dog" versus "the dog sees the boy" swaps meaning by swapping position, not by changing the words themselves. Albanian does this differently: nouns actually change their ending depending on the job they’re doing in the sentence. That system is called case, and it doesn’t exist in English at all — this is probably the single most foreign grammatical feature for an English speaker learning Albanian.

Albanian has 5 cases: Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, and Ablative. (There’s no Vocative, unlike some other European languages.)

• Nominative — the subject of the sentence, the one doing the action: Studenti flet shqip ("The student speaks Albanian").
• Accusative — the direct object, the thing the action happens to: Unë shoh librin ("I see the book"). Also used after several prepositions (në, mbi, nën, me, për, pa).
• Dative — the indirect object, usually "to/for" someone: I dërgoj librin shokut ("I send the book to my friend"). Also used for the experiencer with verbs like "like," "hurt," "seem": Më pëlqen kjo këmishë ("I like this shirt," literally "this shirt pleases to-me").
• Genitive — possession, "of" something: libri i studentit ("the student’s book," literally "the book of the student").
• Ablative — "from," material, or used after a long list of fixed prepositions (larg, pranë, prej, sipas, and more).

Genitive and Dative always share the exact same form for nouns (and for demonstratives and kush/cili too) — memorizing one gets you the other for free. Ablative usually matches them too, with a couple of exceptions.

Here’s one noun, libër ("book"), declined through all 5 cases in both the indefinite and definite singular, to see the pattern in one place:

• Nominative: (një) libër → libri
• Accusative: (një) libër → librin
• Dative: (një) libri → librit
• Genitive: i/e (një) libri → i/e librit
• Ablative: (prej) (një) libri → (prej) librit

Once you know a noun’s nominative forms (see "Definiteness" and "Plural formation"), the other four cases mostly reuse them rather than introducing new endings from scratch — accusative is identical to the nominative except in the definite singular, genitive is identical to the dative in every cell, and ablative copies the dative in three of its four cells. Each case’s own page ("Nominative", "Accusative", "Dative", "Genitive", "Ablative") covers exactly which cells are copied and which aren’t, plus how and why that case is actually used.

Head back to "Nouns: the basics" for the overview.