The dative construction is a grammatical way of constructing a sentence using the dative case. A sentence is also said to be in dative construction if the subject and the object (direct or indirect) can switch their places for a given verb, without altering the verb's structure (subject becoming the new object, and the object becoming the new subject). The latter case is not to be confused with the passive voice, where only the direct object of a sentence becomes the subject of the passive-voiced sentence, and the verb's structure also changes to convey the meaning of the passive voice. The dative construction tends to occur when the verb indicates a state rather than an action.

There has not been extensive research on dative construction in Persian, but they can be easily found in Persian:

In German, the dative construction sometimes occurs with the verb sein ("to be"). Compare:

The first example implies that the speaker has a cold personality. The subject here (ich, "I") is in the nominative case. The second construction is used when one wants to say "I am (feeling) cold" in German. While in English the subject of the sentence "I am cold" is "I", in German the subject of the sentence "Mir ist kalt" is the implied dummy pronoun es ("it"-NOMINATIVE NEUTER), and mir ("me"-DATIVE) is the indirect object. The use of the nominative form equivalent to "I" is only possible with a different meaning: "Ich bin kalt"='I am cold (in personality)'. "Mir" behaves like a subject and can control infinitives:

"Mir

me.DAT

war

was