Genitive adjective declension (definite articles)

Adjectives in the Genitive case

When discussing politics, laws, and civic duties, you will frequently use the Genitive case to express possession or relationships, such as "the power of the government" or "the election of the parliament".

Declining adjectives after definite articles in the Genitive case follows one simple rule: the adjective always ends in "-en".

It does not matter if the noun is masculine, feminine, neuter, or plural. As long as it follows a Genitive definite article (des or der), you just add -en to the adjective.

Let's look at a neuter noun. The definite article das becomes des, the noun gets an -s or -es ending, and the adjective takes -en.

For feminine nouns, the article die becomes der. The noun itself does not change, and the adjective takes -en.

Masculine nouns behave just like neuter nouns. The article der changes to des, the noun typically gets an -s or -es ending, and the adjective takes -en.

Finally, for plural nouns, the article die becomes der. Once again, the adjective simply takes -en.

Genitive declension at a glance

Here is a quick summary of how the definite articles, adjectives, and nouns change in the Genitive case:

Notice how the adjective ending is consistently -en across the board. You can see this uniformity in action when contrasting multiple genders in the same sentence: