Old English is a language rich with morphological diversity

It maintains several distinct cases: the nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and instrumental, remnants of which survive only in a few pronouns in Modern English

Modern English grammar displays minimal inflection compared with most other Indo-European languages

For example, Modern English, unlike Modern German or Dutch and the Romance languages, lacks grammatical gender and adjectival agreement

Case marking has almost disappeared from Modern English and mainly survives in pronouns

The patterning of strong (e.g. speak/spoke/spoken) versus weak verbs inherited from Germanic has declined in importance on the way from Old English to Modern English

As inflection has declined in importance in English, the language has developed a greater reliance on features such as modal verbs and word order to convey grammatical information