The Russian nominative case.

When to use the nominative case

The nominative is the most common case and the simplest to spot. It has three core jobs.

1. The subject of the sentence

Whoever or whatever performs the action goes in the nominative. This is its main job, and the subject is almost always nominative.

• Брат читает. - My brother is reading. (брат does the reading)
• Собака спит. - The dog is sleeping.
• Студенты работают. - The students are working.
• Москва большая. - Moscow is big.

2. The dictionary and citation form

The nominative is the form you find in every dictionary and word list. When you learn a new noun, you learn its nominative first, then build the other cases from it. It's also the form used for labels, signs, and titles.

• стол - table (the form you'd look up)
• «Война и мир» - "War and Peace" (a title stays nominative)

3. The predicate after the zero copula

Russian has no present-tense "is/are." In the present, the noun naming what the subject is stays in the nominative, with no verb between them.

• Он врач. - He is a doctor. (no verb; врач is nominative)
• Это моя сестра. - This is my sister.
• Мы друзья. - We are friends.

How the nominative shows gender

Because the nominative is the base form, its ending is what tells you a noun's gender, and gender decides every other case ending. Reading the nominative ending is the first real skill in Russian grammar.

• Masculine: usually a consonant (стол, брат) or -й (музей), sometimes -ь (словарь).
• Feminine: usually -а / -я (книга, неделя), sometimes -ь (ночь).
• Neuter: -о / -е (окно, море).

The -ь ending is the one ambiguity: a noun ending in a soft sign can be masculine or feminine, and you simply learn which. Everything else you can read straight off the ending.

Nominative noun endings

The singular nominative is the unmarked base form. The plural is where endings appear: most nouns take -ы/-и, neuters take -а/-я.

The pattern to remember: the nominative singular is the form you learn and look up. For the plural, hard masculine and most feminine nouns take -ы, soft stems and feminine -я/-ь take -и, and neuters take -а / -я. A handful of masculine nouns take a stressed -а plural (город → города, дом → дома).

Pronoun forms in the nominative

These are the base pronouns, the ones you learn first. Every other case (меня, мне, мной...) is built from them.

Example sentences

The nominative marks the subject in each of these. Notice it never changes after a preposition or a verb acting on it, that's a different case's job.

Common pitfalls

The nominative is the easiest case to form, but learners trip on knowing when not to use it.

• Using nominative after a preposition. Prepositions always trigger another case. "в Москва" is wrong; it's "в Москве" (prepositional). The subject is nominative, but anything after a preposition is not.
• Leaving the object in nominative. "Я читаю книга" is wrong - the thing being read is a direct object and takes the accusative: "Я читаю книгу." Only the subject stays nominative.
• Forgetting the instrumental with past or future "to be." The zero copula keeps the predicate nominative only in the present. In the past and future, the profession or role usually goes into the instrumental: "Он был врачом" (He was a doctor), not "врач."
• Adjective agreement. A predicate adjective agrees with its nominative subject in gender and number: книга интересная, фильм интересный, окно интересное.