Icelandic traditionally recognizes four grammatical cases.
The cases are nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and some numerals change form according to their grammatical role, possession, or relationship to other words.
Icelandic is a North Germanic language descended from the Norse spoken by settlers who arrived in Iceland during the late ninth and tenth centuries. Its inflectional system preserves features that have been reduced or lost in related modern Scandinavian languages, especially English and Danish.
The four-case system does not mean that every noun has one identical ending in every context. Icelandic nouns belong to grammatical genders and declension patterns, so endings vary. Icelandic is also famous for maintaining a close connection with its medieval literary heritage, including the Icelandic sagas, although modern pronunciation and vocabulary have changed over time.