The Dutch language in its modern form does not have grammatical cases, and nouns only have singular and plural forms. Many remnants of former case declensions remain in the Dutch language, but few of them are productive. One exception is the genitive case, which is still productive to a certain extent. Although in the spoken language the case system was probably in a state of collapse as early as the 16th century, cases were still prescribed in the written standard up to 1946/1947. This article describes the system in use until then. For a full description of modern Dutch grammar, see Dutch grammar. See also History of Dutch orthography. Case usage The four Dutch cases were the nominative, genitive, dative and accusative. They were still alive and in use in Middle Dutch, but they gradually fell out of use in early modern Dutch. Seventeenth-century grammarians and those that came after them attempted to keep the case system alive, and codified a written standard that included them. This standard was prescriptive—an attempt to influence how people wrote and spoke Dutch rather than to reflect how they already spoke naturally. It included not just the crumbling case system, but also a strict separation between masculine and feminine genders, falling out of use in some dialects as well. Many grammarians of the time attempted to make Dutch more like Latin and Greek, and even included cases such as the ablative and locative which had not existed in any ancestor of Dutch since Proto-Indo-European times. By the 18th century, the everyday spoken language had lost its case system in most dialects, but it remained present in the written standard. Rules for the use of cases were relaxed in the Marchant spelling of 1934, and were finally abolished in the 1946/1947 spelling reform, along with many other archaic features. After the reform, the use of cases was discouraged, although they were still allowed by the standard. In modern Dutch, they are preserved in certain fixed expressions. They also continue to be used when writers want to make something sound deliberately archaic. Only the nominative case or the accusative case survives in the modern spoken language (nominativism and accusativism respectively); which case survives depends on the dialect. In dialects with accusativism, the masculine and feminine genders remain distinct; in dialects with nominativism, they are merged. This is because in the older declension, the nominative was the