Plurals

I'm not going to lie, Swedish plurals are tripping me up right now. It took me longer than it should have to work through the plurals section on Duolingo last night. I'm probably going to go back through it just to make sure I understand it all.

The helpful thing about Swedish, is that it seems to use a lot of patterns. (Except when it doesn't. Which can feel like all the time.) Most of the time, you just have to learn the patterns (like with verbs) and then apply them when necessary. Thanks to the explanation on Duolingo, I have a decent pattern for plurals which I'll explain below.

If you haven't tried the Swedish course on Duolingo, you really should. You can find it here.

Alright, on to the good stuff.

So as you probably know, Swedish nouns are grouped by gender. (If you didn't know that, now you do.) They are either common -en- words, or neuter -ett- words, and you pretty much just have to learn the gender when you learn the word. And you can't skip them, because then you'll never be able to say a or the in regards to a noun. Fun!

I'll be breaking up the explanation on plurals by the noun gender, which is how I learned it.

EN Words

 Common -en- words that end with an 'a' will switch to an 'or' in plural form.
en flicka > flickor  (girl > girls)

If your word ends in an 'e' it will switch to 'ar'.
en pojke > pojkar  (boy > boys)

Words ending in 'ing' become 'ingar'.
en tidning > tidningar  (newspaper > newspapers)

 Words ending in 'are' don't change.
en läkare > läkare  (doctor > docktor)

 Words with a stress on the last syllable will add an 'er'.
en elefant > elefanter  (elephant > elephants)

Words ending in 'el' 'er' and 'en' will usually drop the 'e' and add an 'ar' to the end.
en vinter > vintrar  (winter > winters)

 One syllable words will usually take an 'ar' but sometimes will take an 'er'. You just have to learn them.
en hund > hundar  (dog >dogs)


ETT Words (the easy set)

  If the word ends in a consonant, there is no ending.
ett barn > barn  (the child > children)

 If the word ends in a vowel, it gets an 'n' on the end.
ett äpple > äpplen  (apple > apples)

 Irregular Words

There are both -en- and -ett- words that  don't follow any of these rules (because why not?). Instead, they often change the main vowel of the word.
en man > män (man > men)

Unfortunately, you have to learn these words as you run into them.


So that's it. You should now be able to puzzle your way through Swedish plurals. Once again, all this information came from Duolingo. Go check out their Swedish course, it's really helping me along.

Until next time. Tack så mycket och hej då.