German cases by frequency: why des is the rarest

In spoken German the nominative is by far the most common case, the accusative and the dative are heard almost equally often wherever a word shows its case, and the genitive is a distant fourth. We measured it in 156 million words of German film and television dialogue. Of the six spellings of "the", des is the rarest definite article: it is only number 133 among the most common words, while das is 3rd, die 7th, der 10th, den 21st and dem 50th. The indefinite eines is rarer still, at number 283. Both rare forms are genitive, and both belong only to the genitive. This post measures the four cases one by one, shows where the genitive is giving way to the dative, and where it is holding on.

Updated 11 October 2026 · 8 min read

How can you count a case?

Most German words do not show their case. Die Frau is the same as a subject and as an object, so a word count cannot tell you how often the accusative is used overall. What it can measure are the forms that belong to one case and nothing else. German's pronouns have plenty of those:

Each cell gives the word's rank among all the words in the dialogue, then how many times it is said per million words. The genitives of ich, du and er cannot be counted, because meiner, deiner and seiner are far more often the possessive "my, your, his" (mit meiner Mutter, "with my mother"). As genitive pronouns they are archaic, kept in a few set phrases such as ich bedarf seiner, "I need him".

Nominative: the subject, three times out of four

Add up ich, du and er and their object forms, and 72.8% of the uses are nominative. That is no surprise: nearly every sentence has a subject, and dialogue is full of "I" and "you". Ich is the single most common word in German film dialogue.

Accusative and dative: almost a tie

The surprise is the other two. Across the same three pronouns, the accusative takes 14.4% and the dative 12.8%. And for "I" the dative wins outright: mir is said 1.14 times as often as mich.

The reason is how German phrases the most ordinary things. Many everyday feelings and opinions put the person in the dative, where English makes them the subject:

• Es tut mir leid — "I'm sorry" (literally "it does me sorrow").
• Mir ist kalt — "I'm cold" ("to me it is cold").
• Das gefällt mir — "I like that" ("that pleases me").
• Wie geht es dir? — "How are you?" ("how goes it for you?").
• Kannst du mir helfen? — "Can you help me?" — helfen takes the dative.

So the dative is not an advanced case to be left for later. If you want to say you are sorry, cold or fine, you need mir and dir from the start.

The genitive: the rarest case

Every count points the same way. Wer ("who") is said 52 times as often as its genitive wessen ("whose"), and wessen is rarer than both wen and wem: the dative wem alone is 5.2 times as common. Among the relative pronouns, the genitive dessen (45.3 per million) and deren (49.1) are outnumbered about four to one by the dative plural denen (196.0).

The articles say it too. Dem is 2.7 times as common as des, and einem 3.3 times as common as eines. All twelve article forms, ranked, are in the der, die, das chart; this post is about the cases behind them.

Is the dative replacing the genitive?

In everyday speech, partly. German grammars describe three ways the dative moves in:

• After prepositions. Wegen, trotz and während take the genitive in the standard written language: wegen des Wetters, "because of the weather". In colloquial speech, and to some extent in the standard language too, the dative appears instead: wegen dem Wetter. Duden itself lists wegen dem Kind and wegen mir as standard in speech.
• With von. Das Haus vom Nachbarn, "the house of the neighbour", instead of das Haus des Nachbarn.
• The possessive dative. Dem Vater sein Auto, literally "to the father his car", for "the father's car". It is widespread in dialects and casual speech, and it is the joke in the title of Bastian Sick's 2004 bestseller about German usage, Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod: "the dative is the death of the genitive", written in exactly the construction it describes. The first volume sold more than 1.5 million copies in two years.

How far has it gone on screen? We read the full German subtitle text, 220 million words, and looked at the word after each preposition. Only a masculine or neuter article settles the case (des, eines, meines are genitive; dem, einem, meinem are dative), so wegen der, which could be either, is left out.

Wegen is where the dative has got furthest: more than a third of the time. Trotz and während still take the genitive almost always. With a pronoun, the dative is already normal: wegen dir (3,743 times) is said more often than the old genitive compound deinetwegen (2,470), and wegen ihm (1,020) more often than seinetwegen (787). Meinetwegen (4,309) still beats wegen mir (3,106), but only because it has a second life as "fine by me, for all I care".

Possession, though, still goes to the genitive on screen. Meines Vaters, "my father's", appears 4,586 times, against 1,149 for von meinem Vater, and that second figure includes every "from my father" as well. Across father, brother, husband, son and friend, the genitive leads 8,508 to 2,401.

That needs one caution. Subtitles are written down, often by translators, and written German keeps the genitive; the grammars place von and the possessive dative in casual speech and dialect, which subtitles seldom record. What the counts show is the German you will read on a screen, and that German has not given up the genitive.

Where the genitive survives

Even in the dialects, where the genitive has mostly gone, it hangs on with people's names, with words for family (as meines Vaters above shows), and in fixed phrases. The subtitles show the phrases plainly:

• Fixed phrases. 19% of every eines in the subtitles is the start of eines Tages, "one day". Eines Nachts ("one night") and eines Abends ("one evening") are the next time phrases on the list.
• After a few prepositions and nouns. The words most often heard just before des are wegen (3.5% of all des), Ende (2.3%, as in Ende des Monats, "the end of the month"), Teil (1.8%, "part of the…") and Namen (1.3%, im Namen des Gesetzes, "in the name of the law").
• Names. Peters Auto, Annas Bruder: the genitive -s on a person's name is one of the places it survives even in dialect.

What this means for learning German

Learn the nominative and accusative first, and the dative right behind them, because the dative turns up in the commonest things people say. Learn the genitive to recognise it: you will read it constantly and hear it in set phrases, and with wegen you can use the dative in conversation: Duden accepts wegen dem Kind in speech. Mixing up the accusative and the dative is a different matter: mich ist kalt for mir ist kalt is simply wrong.

Verbavia (our own course) teaches the cases one at a time, the accusative before the dative, alongside the most common German words in frequency order, with the grammar explained in English and reading, listening and writing sections built from words you already know. The German course is free on the web, in any browser, including on a phone, and the German vocabulary test tells you in two minutes how far down the list you already are.

Cases are one of the three reasons in is German hard to learn, and the verbs that take the dative, such as helfen and gefallen, are among the 100 most common German verbs. If you are still choosing a language, German or Spanish weighs the case system against Spanish verbs.

Sources

• Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
• Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com. The ranks and per-million figures are read from its German list.
• OPUS, OpenSubtitles 2018 monolingual German text, object.pouta.csc.fi, for what follows wegen, statt, trotz and während, the possessive phrases and the words around des and eines. How every count was made, including which forms settle a case and which do not, is in scripts/frequency_cases_de.py.
• Wikipedia: German pronouns, for the case forms of ich, du, er and wer and the relative pronouns, and the note that genitive personal pronouns are seldom used in modern German.
• Wikipedia: German declension, for the genitive personal pronouns as archaic (ich bedarf seiner).
• Wikipedia (German): Genitiv, for the dative after während, trotz and wegen in colloquial and partly in standard German; das Haus vom Nachbarn and dem Vater sein Auto; and the genitive surviving in dialects with personal names, family words and fixed phrases.
• Duden: wegen, "Präposition mit Genitiv", and in speech also with the dative: wegen dem Kind, wegen mir.
• Wikipedia: Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod, for Bastian Sick's book (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004), its title, and the first volume's sales.