Plural Formation For Intermediate learners
What is a Plural Noun?
In General, plural means more than one. In English, "an apple" is a singular noun because it's just one single apple. But when you say "two apples" or "five apples" then the noun is plural.
What is German pluralization?
Making something plural in English is easy. You can usually add "s" to the end of the word. German pluralization is a bit more complicated because it has different patterns and many exceptions.
Common Plural Patterns
In German, there are many different patterns for pluralization. Sometimes you should add certain endings for pluralization and sometimes those changes should be accompanied by changing a vowel in the stem of the noun, too.
Common plural patterns can be listed as follows:
Plural with –e or -¨e
Plural with -er or -¨er
Plural with -n / -en
Plural with –s
Plural with –e or -¨e
This pattern is very common for masculine and neuter nouns.
der Tag → die Tage
the day → the days
der Sohn → die Söhne
the son → the sons
Plural with -er or -¨er
das Buch → die Bücher
the book → the books
das Kind → die Kinder
the child → the children
Plural with -n / -en
This pattern is mostly found in feminine nouns and those masculine nouns that end in –e.
die Frau → die Frauen
the woman → the women
der Junge → die Jungen
the boy → the boys
Plural with –s
Only a few nouns belong to this group, and they are often loanwords and end in a vowel.
das Auto → die Autos
the car → the cars
das Café → die Cafés
the café → the cafés
Note!
The definite article for all plurals is "die".
der Hund → die Hunde
the dog → the dogs
die Katze → die Katzen
the cat → the cats
das Kind → die Kinder
the kid → the kids
Note!
There are some nouns that remain unchanged and have the same form regardless of being singular or plural.
das Mädchen → die Mädchen
the girl → the girls
das Fenster → die Fenster
the window → the windows
Vowel Change
In order to change the form of some nouns from singular to plural, you need to change the vowel. For doing that, you should find the vowel stem of that noun. The vowel stem refers to the core vowel sound in a noun. This core vowel should change to an umlaut in certain words in order to be plural.
Umlaut
An umlaut affects three German vowels only. After adding the umlaut, the sound becomes more compressed in the mouth.
+¨ | |
|---|---|
a | ä |
o | ö |
u | ü |
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