German has four cases. You already know three of them: nominative, accusative and dative. The fourth is called genitive. The genitive is used to express possession or belonging.
A noun can be complemented by another noun in the genitive, called "das Genitivattribut", which tells us who something belongs to. If the "Genitivattribut" is a name, it generally comes before the other noun and gets the ending -s.
Das ist Selmas Handy.
Das ist Sebastians Gitarre.
An apostrophe is used instead of the ending -s if the name or proper noun already ends in an s-sound (-s, -ß, -z or -x):
Das ist Max' Fahrrad.
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Grammatical terms in German: der Genitiv: In German there are four different forms or categories of nouns (cases) called Fälle or Kasus. Along with the nominative, the accusative and the dative, there is also the genitive. Nouns take this case, for example, when they follow certain prepositions or define something more closely as an attribute of another noun. Possession or association can be expressed with the genitive attribute. The articles have the forms: des/eines, der/einer, der/-. An -s is often added to masculine and neuter nouns and to proper names. |