Noun

A noun is one of the parts of speech. It is a word that names a person, thing, place, animal, event, or abstract idea. Examples include: man, book, city, camel, wedding, freedom. In most languages, nouns form the largest class of words, and they typically fill the positions of subject and object in a sentence.

The standard distinction is between common nouns (words for multiple things of the same kind, such as 'boy') and proper nouns (words for a single thing or person, such as 'Mogadishu'). Nouns are also divided into concrete nouns (water, stone) and abstract nouns (anger, knowledge).

Grammatical features

Nouns typically carry grammatical markings. The most common ones found across languages are: number (singular and plural), gender (masculine and feminine), and case (marking the noun's function in the sentence). Each language distributes these features differently; some languages (such as Turkish) have no gender, while others have numerous cases.

The noun in Somali

In Somali, nouns have two genders: masculine and feminine. Gender is marked by the article attached to the noun: -ka/-ki for masculine nouns (the man, the book), -ta/-ti for feminine nouns (the woman, the city). Therefore gender is often not apparent from the noun itself, but emerges from the attached article.

Plurals are formed in several different ways, such as by adding a suffix (book – books, man – men) or by altering the final consonant. In some nouns, the gender changes when the form shifts to plural; this is a feature characteristic of Somali and other Cushitic languages.

Case in Somali nouns is marked by tone and small changes at word boundaries. A noun functioning as a subject may take a different form than one functioning as an object; for example, a change in the attached article (the man/the man as subject). The noun's role in the sentence is therefore not conveyed by its form alone, but also depends on these markers.