The nominative case (ـُ)

Formal Case Endings

In formal Arabic—such as news broadcasts, official speeches, and literature—words take short vowel endings to indicate their grammatical role in a sentence. This system is called الإعراب.

While these short vowels are rarely written in everyday text, news anchors and public speakers pronounce them clearly to sound professional and precise.

The Nominative Case (المرفوع)

The default grammatical case in Arabic is the Nominative case. It is marked by the short vowel ـُ (Damma).

If a noun is indefinite, the ending is doubled, written as ـٌ (Tanwin Damma).

The Nominative case is primarily used for two parts of a sentence:

• The subject of the sentence
• The predicate (the core information about the subject) in a nominal (verbless) sentence

Subjects and Predicates

In a simple nominal sentence, both the subject and the predicate are in the Nominative case. In formal speech, the definite subject ends with the ـُ vowel, and the indefinite predicate ends with the ـٌ vowel.

Adjective Agreement

When an adjective directly modifies a noun, it must match that noun's grammatical case. If the subject is in the Nominative case, any adjective attached to it is also Nominative.

In the following example, both the subject and its modifying adjective are definite, so they both take a single ـُ, while the indefinite predicate takes the ـٌ ending:

The Nominative Case in Context

These patterns form the backbone of formal news announcements. Notice how the subjects, their descriptive adjectives, and their predicates all operate in the Nominative case:

Seeing the endings

This course writes Arabic the way newspapers and books print it: without the short-vowel marks. So the drills above look like الوزير مشغول, and the endings live only in the audio. Here are the same sentences with every vowel written out:

The definite subject ends in ـُ (الوَزِيرُ). The indefinite predicate ends in ـٌ (مَشْغُولٌ). Listen for the final -u and -un when you play the sentences.