Cases and Articles

The nominal inflections in the Balkan languages are to a great extent replaced by prepositions. In Macedonian, Bulgarian and Megleno-Romanian there are only vestiges of the declensions – dative (Dat) and accusative (Acc) forms of personal pronouns and Acc forms of masculine proper names, though, in some dialects, Acc forms for common nouns have been preserved and Dat relationships are represented by distinct Dat forms preceded by a preposition. There are also vocative (Voc) forms of proper names and a short list of other nouns.1 In Romanian and Aromanian there are distinct Dat forms for all nouns and Dat and Acc forms for personal pronouns. In Albanian both nouns and personal pronouns have three distinct oblique case forms – Dat, Acc and ablative (Abl), though with nouns the Acc forms are often equivalent to the nominative (Nom) ones, while the Abl ones are equivalent to the Dat ones.