Nepali grammar

Nepali grammar is the morphology and syntax of Nepali, an Indo-European language spoken in South Asia.

Nepali nouns that denote male and female beings are sometimes distinguished by suffixation or through pairs of lexically differing terms. Thus one pattern involves masculine -o/ā vs feminine -ī suffixes (e.g. chorā "son" : chorī "daughter", buṛho "old man" : buṛhī "old woman"), while another such phenomenon is that of the derivational feminine suffix -nī (e.g. chetrī "Chetri" : chetrīnī "Chetri woman", kukur "dog" : kukurnī "female dog"). Beyond this, nouns are otherwise not overtly marked (i.e. inanimate nouns, abstract nouns, all other animates).

Overall, in terms of grammatical gender, among Indo-Aryan languages, Nepali possesses an "attenuated gender" system, in which "gender accord typically is restricted to female animates (so that the system is essentially restructured as zero/+Fem), optional or loose even then […], and greatly reduced in syntactic scope. […] In Nepali, the [declensional] ending is a neutral -o, changeable to -ī with Personal Feminines in more formal style."^{[clarification needed]}

Nepali distinguishes two numbers, with a common pluralizing suffix for nouns in -harū (e.g. mitra "friend" : mitraharū "friends"). Unlike the English plural it is not mandatory, and may be left unexpressed if plurality is already indicated in some other way: e.g. by explicit numbering, or agreement. Riccardi (2003:554) further notes that the suffix "rarely indicates simple plurality: it often means that other objects of the same or a like class are also indicated and may be translated as 'and other things'."

Adjectives may be divided into declinable and indeclinable categories. Declinables are marked, through termination, for the gender and number of the nouns they qualify. The declinable endings are -o for the "masculine" singular, -ī for the feminine singular, and -ā for the plural. e.g. sāno kitāb "small book", sānī keṭī "small girl", sānā kalamharū "small pens".

"Masculine", or rather "neutral" -o is the citation form and the otherwise overwhelmingly more encountered declension, as previously noted, gender in Nepali is attenuated and accord "typically is restricted to female animates", and "optional or loose even then". However, "In writing, there has been a strong tendency by some to extend the use of feminine markers beyond their use in speech to include the consistent marking of certain adjectives with feminine endings. This tendency is strengthened by some Nepali grammars and may be reinforced by the influence of Hindi upon both speech and writing."

Indeclinable adjectives are completely invariable, and can end in either consonants or vowels (except -o).

In Nepali the locus of grammatical function or "case-marking" lies within a system of agglutinative suffixes or particles known as postpositions, which parallel English's prepositions. There is a number of such one-word primary postpositions: