The grammar of the Silesian language is characterized by a high degree of inflection, and has relatively free word order, although the dominant arrangement is subject–verb–object (SVO).
Distinctive features include the different treatment of masculine personal nouns in the plural, and the complex grammar of numerals and quantifiers.
Silesian retains the Slavic system of cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives.
There are seven cases: nominative (mianownik), genitive (dopołniŏcz), dative (cylownik), accusative (biernik), vocative (wołŏcz), locative (miyjscownik), and instrumental (nŏrzyndnik).
A few nouns display irregularities resulting from a fossilized dual form, namely in: Silesian, like other Lechitic languages, has three genders in the singular (masculine mynski, feminine żyński, and neuter nijaki).
The following table presents examples of how a determiner tyn/ta/to ("this") agrees with nouns of different genders in the nominative and the accusative, both singular and plural.
tyn ptŏk tyn cios tego ptŏka te ciosy te drōgi te ciasta For verbs, the distinction is only important for past forms in the plural, as in the table below: ptŏk leżoł cios leżoł ciosy leżały drōgi leżały ciasta leżały The numeral dwa ("two"), on the other hand, behaves differently, merging masculine non-personal with neuter, but not with feminine: dwa ciosy dwa ciasta Gender can usually be inferred from the ending of a noun.
Soft declensions are used when the stem of the noun ends in a soft (postalveolar or palatal-like) consonant in all forms, while hard declensions are used by nouns with stems ending in a hard consonant in some (but not necessarily all) forms.
[4] This group comprises nouns with adjectival declension, and can be masculine or feminine, taking the appropriate gender ending.
This group comprises nouns ending in -um in the singular and neuter declensions in the plural.
[5] [5] Adjectives agree with the noun they modify in terms of gender, number and case.
Comparatives of adverbs are formed (where they exist) with the ending -(i)yj (e.g. dugo → dużyj).
The usual relative pronouns are kery, chtory, and ftory (which, which one; that) (declined like an adjective).
The numeral jedyn (1) behaves as an ordinary adjective, and no special rules apply.
but not 12, 13, or 14, which take -nŏście as a suffix and are thus not compound numbers in the first place), the noun is plural and takes the same case as the numeral, and the resulting noun phrase is plural (e.g. 4 koty stały, "4 cats stood").
With the masculine personal plural forms of numbers (as given in the morphology article section), the rule given above – that if the numeral is nominative or accusative, the noun is genitive plural and the resulting phrase is neuter singular – applies to all numbers other than 1 (as in trzech chopōw prziszło, "three men came").
These include kilka ("several"), ("a few") and wiele ("much, many"), which behave like numbers above 5 in terms of the noun cases and verb forms taken.
Quantifiers that always take the genitive of nouns include dużo ("much, many"), mało ("few, little"), wiyncyj ("more"), mynij ("less") (also nojwiyncyj/nojmynij "most/least"), trochã ("a bit").
The words ôba and ôbydwa (meaning "both"), and their derived forms behave like dwa.
Each verb is either imperfective, meaning that it denotes continuous or habitual events, or perfective, meaning that it denotes single completed events (in particular, perfective verbs have no present tense).
To make third-person imperative sentences (including with the polite second-person pronouns pōn etc.)