The prototypical definite noun phrase picks out a unique, familiar, specific referent such as the sun or Australia, as opposed to indefinite examples like an idea or some fish.
[5][page needed] It is common for definiteness to interact with the marking of case in certain syntactic contexts.
For example, in Turkish, the direct object in the sentence adamı gördüm (meaning "I saw the man") is marked with the suffix -ı (indicating definiteness).
In Serbo-Croatian, in the Baltic languages Latvian and Lithuanian, and, to a lesser extent in Slovene, definiteness can be expressed morphologically on prenominal adjectives.
In some Scandinavian languages, such as Swedish, definite nouns inflect with a dedicated set of suffixes.