Nouns: the basics

A noun in Albanian works much like in English — it names a person, place, thing, or idea — but Albanian nouns carry a lot more grammatical information built into their ending. Every noun has a fixed gender, changes its ending depending on whether it’s definite or indefinite, whether it’s singular or plural, and what role it plays in the sentence (its case).

Gender: masculine or feminine (Albanian has no everyday neuter). As a rough guide, nouns ending in a consonant tend to be masculine and nouns ending in a vowel tend to be feminine — but this is only a guide, not a rule, so gender has to be learned with each word.

Gender can shift in the plural. Some masculine singular nouns become grammatically feminine once they’re plural — this happens with nouns whose plural is formed by adding -e (often -im nouns or certain loanwords): një shtet evropian ("a European state," masculine) becomes disa shtete evropiane ("some European states," feminine — notice the adjective’s ending changes too).

Number: singular or plural, same concept as English, but the plural is formed in several different ways depending on the noun’s ending — see the "Plural formation" page for the full picture.

Definiteness: Albanian doesn’t use a separate word for "the" — the definite article is a suffix attached directly to the end of the noun. "A book" is libër, "the book" is libri. See the "Definiteness" page for how this suffix changes shape depending on the noun.

Case: the noun’s ending also changes depending on its grammatical role in the sentence — subject, object, possessor, and so on. This is the single biggest difference from English grammar, and it gets its own page: see "Cases."