Gens hic habitat.

Gens is a noun that can mean clan, tribe, nation, people, or family line, depending on context.

A native English speaker may expect something like people to be plural, but Latin gens is grammatically singular. It refers to a group as one unit, much like English a nation or a tribe.

So in this sentence, gens is the group that is doing the action.

Because Latin often treats a group as a single grammatical unit.

So gens is like saying:

• a tribe
• a nation
• a people

Even though many individuals are included, the word itself is singular. That is why the verb is also singular: habitat, not habitant.

Here gens is in the nominative singular, because it is the subject of the sentence.

You can tell from its job in the sentence:

• gens = the one that lives
• habitat = lives/dwells

So gens is the subject, and subjects are normally in the nominative case.

Also, gens is a third-declension noun.

Habitat is:

• third person singular
• present tense
• active voice
• indicative mood

It comes from habitō, habitāre, meaning to live, to dwell, or to inhabit.

So habitat means he/she/it lives or dwells. Since the subject is gens, the sense is the tribe/nation lives or dwells.

Because the subject gens is singular.

Compare:

• gens habitat = the tribe lives
• gentes habitant = the tribes live

Even though gens refers to many people collectively, grammatically it is one singular noun, so it takes a singular verb.

Because in this sentence hic is not the adjective/pronoun meaning this. Here it is the adverb meaning here.

That is a very common beginner question, because Latin also has:

• hic = this (masculine)
• haec = this (feminine)
• hoc = this (neuter)

But there is also an unrelated adverb:

• hic = here

In Gens hic habitat, hic means here, so it does not change form and does not agree with gens.

You know from how it fits into the sentence.

If hic meant this, it would need to go with a masculine noun, but gens is feminine. So hic gens would not make grammatical sense for this tribe.

Instead, the sentence works perfectly if hic is the adverb:

• gens = subject
• hic = here
• habitat = lives

So the structure is simply The tribe lives here.

Not as much as it would be in English.

Latin word order is relatively flexible because the endings tell you the grammatical roles. So all of these could express roughly the same idea:

• Gens hic habitat
• Hic gens habitat
• Habitat hic gens

But the word order can change emphasis or style.

In Gens hic habitat, the sentence begins with gens, so the group itself is slightly foregrounded.

Latin has no articles like English the or a/an.

So gens can mean:

• a tribe
• the tribe
• a nation
• the nation

The exact sense depends on context.

That is very normal in Latin. You often have to supply the or a when translating into English.

Yes, habitāre can sometimes mean inhabit. But in this sentence, with hic meaning here, the most natural sense is lives here or dwells here.

English inhabits here sounds awkward, even though it is not impossible in a very literal translation. A smoother translation would usually be lives here.

Gens is feminine.

That is something you usually just learn with the noun. Its dictionary form is typically given as:

• gens, gentis f.

The f. tells you it is feminine.

Its gender matters for adjectives and pronouns that agree with it, though in this sentence hic is an adverb, so there is no agreement issue.

A common classroom pronunciation would be roughly:

• gens = gents
• hic = hick
• habitat = HAH-bi-taht or HA-bi-tat, depending on pronunciation system

In restored classical pronunciation, it would be approximately:

• gens with a hard g
• hic with h
• habitat with all vowels clearly pronounced

If you are learning with macrons, the verb is habitat without a long vowel in the final syllable, while the dictionary form is habitāre, where the ā is long.

The dictionary forms are:

• gens, gentis = clan, tribe, nation, people
• hic = here
• habitō, habitāre = live, dwell, inhabit

For gens, dictionaries usually give the genitive gentis because it helps you see the stem gent- and recognize that it belongs to the third declension.

Yes, Latin often leaves out subject pronouns, but not usually a full noun if the speaker wants to identify who is acting.

• hic habitat by itself would mean he/she/it lives here, depending on context.
• gens hic habitat explicitly tells you that the tribe/nation is the subject.

So gens is included because the sentence wants to name the subject clearly.