Editing Grammatical case (section)

== Hierarchy of cases ==
{{main article|Case hierarchy}}
Cases can be ranked in the following hierarchy, where a language that does not have a given case will tend not to have any cases to the right of the missing case:<ref name=Blake />{{rp|p.89}}

: [[Nominative case|nominative]] ''or''  [[Absolutive case|absolutive]] → [[Accusative case|accusative]] ''or'' [[Ergative case|ergative]] → [[Genitive case|genitive]] → [[Dative case|dative]] → [[Locative case|locative]] ''or'' [[Prepositional case|prepositional]] → [[Ablative case|ablative]] ''and/or'' [[Instrumental case|instrumental]] → ''others''.

This is, however, only a general tendency. Many forms of [[Central German]], such as [[Colognian dialect|Colognian]] and [[Luxembourgish]], have a dative case but lack a genitive. In [[Irish language|Irish]] nouns, the nominative and accusative have fallen together, whereas the dative–locative has remained separate in some paradigms; Irish also has genitive and vocative cases. In many modern Indo-Aryan languages, the accusative, genitive, and dative have merged to an oblique case, but many of these languages still retain vocative, locative, and ablative cases. Old English had an instrumental case, but neither a locative nor a prepositional case.