(By Oliver Iggesen): "Morphological case inflection is an efficient strategy for encoding syntactic relationships. Therefore one might naively expect that case-marking languages should use it consistently, by applying the same case categories to all nominal expressions occurring in the appropriate syntactic positions. Indeed, there are many case-marking languages of this kind. Such languages exhibiting identical sets of case categories for all nominals are called case symmetrical. Other languages, however, apply case marking more selectively across their lexicon, restricting the occurrence of certain (or all) cases to a subset of their nominals. The different subsets of nominals therefore display different case inventories. This typological property of languages is called case asymmetry, and the languages themselves, case asymmetrical. This map shows the distribution of case-asymmetry vs. case-symmetry on the basis of 261 languages (same sample as in Chapter 49), with case-asymmetrical languages being further divided into distinct subtypes."