The Colognian declension system describes how the Colognian language alters words to reflect their roles in Colognian sentences, such as subject, direct object, indirect object, agent, patient, etc. Declension allows speakers to mark nouns as being used in their different roles – whether as subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, possessives, etc. – by changing the form of the noun plus any associated adjectives or articles instead of indicating this meaning through word order or prepositions (although this also happens in Colognian). Still, Colognian generally makes only limited use of word order; shifting words around either does not alter the meanings of sentences, or yields other types of sentences which have different meanings yet still maintain the roles of the referents of the words as long as their declined forms are kept. Colognian is a predominantly fusional language. It marks its articles, adjectives, nouns, pronouns, and more to distinguish gender, case, and number. Colognian today distinguishes between five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative. There are two kinds of genitives, both of which are periphrastic. One is normally positioned before the noun or noun phrase it refers to, the other always behind. There are three grammatical genders in Colognian: feminine, masculine, and neuter. Almost all nouns have fixed genders, but there is a class of nouns that may switch gender from predominantly neuter to feminine on certain occasions. These almost always refer to female persons. Colognian shares this property with a large number of local and vernacular languages running almost the entire length of the Rhine river. There are two grammatical numbers in Colognian: singular and plural. While a few individual words implicitly have either singular forms only or plural forms only and cannot be marked as the other, almost all nouns exhibit both forms. Colognian has three grammatical persons: 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person. The plural form of the 1st person makes no semantic or formal distinction so as to differentiate between inclusion or exclusion of a 2nd person or a 3rd person, i.e. it always means: "me, but not me alone". Articles Colognian grammatical articles come in several flavours: stressed definite articles, or demonstrative articles: (the, this, that) unstressed definite articles: (the) indefinite articles: (a, an, ∅) possessive articles: (her, his, its, my, our, their, your) Usage and semantics A demonstrative article, or stressed definite article, marks a select or specific one out of a set