Dative

The dative doesn’t borrow its endings from anywhere else — its four cells are typed and learned directly, and the genitive and ablative both lean on it in turn.

Usage

The dative marks the indirect object — usually “to/for” someone: I dërgoj librin shokut (“I send the book to my friend”). It’s also the case for the experiencer with verbs like “like”, “hurt”, or “seem” (pëlqen, dhemb, duket, vjen keq), where Albanian puts the person affected in the dative and the thing itself as the grammatical subject: Më pëlqen kjo këmishë (“I like this shirt”, literally “this shirt pleases to-me”).

A dative indirect object is always doubled by a short clitic pronoun placed right before the verb (i, u, më...) — I dërgoj librin shokut keeps the clitic i even though shokut already says who the book goes to. Leaving the clitic out isn’t just stylistic; it makes the sentence wrong.

Formation

Singular, indefinite — masculine: same shape as the noun’s own nominative definite singular (shoku serves as both “the friend” and “to a friend”).

Singular, indefinite — feminine:

Singular, definite — masculine: nominative definite singular + -t (shoku → shokut, libri → librit).

Singular, definite — feminine:

Whether a feminine noun’s final vowel counts as “stressed” or “unstressed” isn’t marked in writing — a bare -ë is always unstressed, but any other final vowel can go either way (libra, unstressed, vs. kala, stressed, look identical on the page). The noun dictionary shows the confirmed form for each individual word.

Plural, indefinite: plural stem + -ve, both genders (studentë → studentëve, libra → librave, vajza → vajzave).

Plural, definite: identical to the plural indefinite — dative plural doesn’t distinguish definiteness by ending, only context does (studentëve, vajzave serve as both).

See “Genitive” and “Ablative”, both of which copy most of these same forms, or “Cases” for the full picture.