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Lithuanian has a declension system that is similar to declension systems in ancient Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit, Latin or Ancient Greek. It is one of the most complicated declension systems among modern Indo-European and modern European languages.[citation needed]
Traditionally, scholars count up to ten case forms in Lithuanian. However, at least one case is reduced to adverbs and certain fixed expressions and another is extinct in the modern language. So the official variant of Lithuanian has seven cases; moreover, the illative case can be replaced with the locative case. The main cases are:
- nominative (vardininkas); used to identify the inflection type
- genitive (kilmininkas); used to identify the inflection type
- dative (naudininkas)
- accusative (galininkas)
- instrumental (įnagininkas)
- locative (inessive; vietininkas) and with several subcases:
- vocative (šauksmininkas)
Lithuanian has two main grammatical numbers: singular and plural. There is also a dual number, which is used in certain dialects, such as Samogitian. Some words in the standard language retain their dual forms (for example du ("two") and abu ("both"), an indefinite number and super-plural words (Lithuanian: dauginiai žodžiai). Dual forms of pronouns used in the standard language are also optional. Although grammatically the dual number can be applied to any word, in practice it was used quite sporadically during the last century. The singular and the plural are used similarly to many European languages. Singular, plural and dual inflections of the same case always differ among themselves; no rule dictates how to form, for example, the plural inflection from the singular of the same case.