Get your FREE PDF full of resources for German learners today! Simply fill out your info below and Herr Antrim will send it right over!

 

Name 

Email 

Which one are you?

Deutschlerner

Deutschlehrer

Get your PDF!

What to Expect in this Lesson

In order to really understand plural forms of nouns, I’m going to teach you several things. First, I’ll lay the groundwork for how plurals act in the German language on a broad scale. Then I will show you the most common ways that singular nouns are changed into their plural forms. Once we get the common ones down, I’ll talk about some lesser used changes. In the end I’ll give you some tips and tricks that can make this whole system easier and require only 10% of your brain, so you can use the rest of your brain capacity for storing pictures of birds with arms. 

The Basics of German Plurals

Each German noun has at the very least a change in the article used in front of it. You are already familiar with the articles that are commonly associated with masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns; der, die, and das. 

The plural forms of German nouns require the article “die” when used as the subject or direct object of the sentence, i.e. when used in the nominative or accusative cases. The article changes to “den” in the dative case and “der” in the genitive case. If you are just learning about plural forms of nouns, however, there is a very high likelihood that you simply need to use “die” as the article for all plural nouns. 

Most German nouns have both a singular and a plural version.

Some nouns are almost exclusively used in the singular.

There is a plural form of “das Geld”, “die Gelder” (monies), but this has a slightly different meaning. You can say “die Käse” (cheeses) for the plural of “der Käse”, but this is used in pretty specific circumstances. Most people would probably use “die Käsesorten” (types of cheese) instead. 

Some nouns only have a plural version.

To talk about one parent, you either use “der Vater” (father) or “die Mutter” (mother) or the word “das Elternteil” (parental unit), which has always sounded odd to me. 

Rules and Patterns of German Plurals

Before I get into the patterns that nouns follow when changing to the plural, it is important to note that there aren’t really any hard and fast rules. The patterns I am going to show you will help you a lot in memorizing the plural forms of nouns, because they work most of the time, but you are still going to have to learn them for each noun, just like you did for the genders of the nouns. 

By the way, I just made a lesson about how to master der, die, and das with the least effort possible, so you should check that out when you are done with this lesson. 

Pattern 1: Unchanged Forms

Some German nouns keep it simple: the noun itself does not change, but the article becomes “die”. This of course means that none of the feminine nouns are in this category, as the change would not be noticed.

While there are very few absolutes in the German language, you can be assured that any noun that ends with the diminutive endings -chen or -lein, the plural form simply does not change.

A slightly less reliable rule is that nouns that end with -er usually don’t change in the plural.

You can actually generalize this rule a bit more and say that masculine or neuter nouns that end with -el or -er don’t change the noun. Instead they simply change the article.

Some masculine nouns add an umlaut in addition to changing the article to “die”.

There are no feminine nouns in the strict “no change” category, there are a couple that require only an umlaut.

These are the only two that I have ever found that do this.

Pattern 2: Adding -e, ¨e, or ¨er

Here is a fun statistic: 80% of masculine nouns and 75% of neuter nouns will simply add -e to the end of the noun and change the article to “die” when creating the plural. In fact, if the noun ends with -ling, -ig, or -ich, it will definitely use an -e for the plural. Here are a few examples of that. 

Nouns Ending with -ling

Nouns Ending with -ig

Nouns Ending with -ich

Nouns Ending with -nis add -e and double the -s at the end

80% of masculine nouns and 75% of neuter nouns use -e for the ending.

Here are some examples that don’t end with the suffixes I mentioned. 

Some nouns require an umlaut in addition to -e.

There are also a few nouns that add -er instead of just -e.

Those nouns will always have an umlaut in the plural form and will never be feminine.

Pattern 3: Adding -n, -en, or -nen

The German language really likes adding -n to stuff. That is incredibly apparent in the way nouns become plural. There are three subcategories that all end with the word ending with -n. The first is the easiest, simply add -n to the noun and change the article to “die”. 

This generally happens with nouns that end in -e, which coincidentally are usually feminine nouns. Neither of those are hard rules, as not all nouns that end with -e are feminine and not all nouns that take -n for the plural end with -e. There are a bunch of nouns, however, that do follow that rule.

The only noun that requires -n in the plural, but does not end with -e would be:

If a noun is feminine, but ends with a consonant, you will likely add -en instead of just -n.

There are also a few masculine nouns that use -en for the plural form. 

Some feminine nouns don’t end with a consonant, but will still require -en.

Feminine versions of occupations that end with -in all add -nen.

When you start with the masculine version of something, usually an occupation or nationality, and you want to make a feminine form of that, you generally add -in and if possible an umlaut to create that feminine version. For example: 

All of those are just feminine versions of the masculine nouns. In order to make those plural, we add -nen. This is one of the rules that you can take to the bank. It will always work. If you have a feminine version of a noun that ends with -in, add -nen for the plural. 

Pattern 4: Cognates and Endings in -o, -a, -i

The last pattern that you can actually rely on is nouns that add -s for the plural. These include lots of English words that have been borrowed into the German vocabulary and almost every noun in the entire German language that ends with -i, -a or -o. For example: 

-s is also the standard plural ending for abbreviations.

There are a few words that end with -i, -a, or -o, but use a German plural ending.

These words have been around in German for long enough to have developed their own legitimately German plural endings, but there are some people that still use an S ending instead.

Miscellaneous Outliers

Technically speaking there are other plural patterns in German. These are usually words that are stolen from other languages and then they use a Germanized version of that language’s plural formation.

These kinds of plural formations are so rare that it is in your best interest to simply commit them to memory when you encounter them. Or do like the Germans do and just make up your own version that sounds vaguely Germanic. I found out while researching this lesson that some Germans use the plural of “Kaktus” as “die Kaktusse”. 

If you are a super-nerd like me, you might be bored enough to look at the list of these kinds of nouns that I found on cafe-lingua.de, which is linked here. 

Summary

I hope you found this explanation enlightening and definitely a better answer than I gave that kid in my class way back when. Just remember that all plural nouns require the article “die” unless you are using the dative or genitive cases. Most nouns will either add -e or -n or some variation thereof. The other outliers can be learned when you learn the noun itself. 

Remember, practice makes perfect! Keep exploring and using these forms in your German language journey. Viel Erfolg. Viel Glück. Am wichtigsten aber, viel Spaß. Tschüss.