Talk:German language

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German language was a good article, but it was removed from the list as it no longer met the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated.
Review: October 13, 2006.

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Mistakable sentence

Quote from the section "Noun inflection": Inflection for case on the noun itself is required in the singular for strong masculine and neuter nouns in the genitive and sometimes in the dative. Both of these cases are losing ground to substitutes in informal speech. The dative ending is considered somewhat old-fashioned in many contexts and often dropped.

One must distinguish here between the wide-spread loss of the genitive case in informal speech and that of the dative ending. The genitive is not much used in colloquial German (des Mannes > von dem Mann), but there is no tendency to avoid the dative. Only the noun ending (dem Manne) is usually lost, but the dative as such is stable because the article retains its dative form.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.83.226.12 (talk) 19 October 2012‎

German MOOC course

Please add to external links

[http://worldmentoringacademy.com/www/index.php?ctg=lesson_info&lessons_ID=1080 MOOC German language course]: Free German course with Audio, Text, G+ hangouts, media, & Culture.

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Blank statement about dative and genitive

There is a claim in section "Grammar" - subsection "Noun inflection" which states "Both of these cases are losing ground to substitutes in informal speech." referring to dative and genitive. This claim is neither proven nor can it be substantiated. It is pretty much an urban legend, which is almost always told when dative and genitive is mentioned. There is no reliable evidence, such as scientific studies that proof such language changes. For such claims reliable evidence which meet scientific standards must be used to state a language change. This is also important taking into account that language learners use WP as a source, and reading this claim may lead to the misconception that dative and genitive is not that important to learn, which would be a huge mistake. -92.209.109.221 (talk) 13:29, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I've added the {{Citation needed}} template right after the sentence you critcize. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 13:56, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The criticism of a lack of source is, of course, entirely proper, and the blank statement in the article unhelpfully conceals a number of different phenomena, but the blunt rejection of the point just shows the complainant's ignorance of the literature. The decline of the genitive is not an urban legend but a well established fact about the development of New High German since the Middle Ages. There's plenty of literature on the subject just do a search for "Genitivschwund" or "Rückgang des Genitivs" (or just consider the case now used with wegen, or vergessen. I take it the complainant has never come across a construction like dem Mann sein Hut. The replacement of the dative by the accusative is less marked but certainly well-established (actually it's mainly their coalescense into a single "oblique case"), albeit not in the standard language. If you're going to castigate someone else's contribution as nonsense, you'd better be sure of your ground, and you have to be much better informed to say "there is no evidence". --Pfold (talk) 16:57, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You're right about the genitive case, but the sentence is about two cases, dative and genitive. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 18:02, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You shouldn't take or assume anything about someone else. So please talk about the subject and only the subject. The construction "dem Mann sein Hut" is purely a dialect construction due to the fact that most German dialects do not have a genitive and compensate possessive constructions through a dative construction. Most literature I have read so far does not give much account to the dialect's influence while speaking the standard dialect, which is most likely the explanation for the phenomen of replacing a possessive genitive with a dative construction while speaking the standard dialect. Given that, the decline of the genitive is in my view just a misconception of a phenomen that was once taken or misinterpreted as a decline and this was told for a long time without questioning. In any way, if the genitive is still in decline, there should be studies that describe such a decline. Add those studies which meet scientific standards which proof the decline of the genitive in spoken language and we are good. You don't have to convince me, but this artilce has to meet WP standards. -178.6.169.248 (talk) 08:20, 29 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]