Plurals

Swedish noun plurals are more complex than English. English usually adds -s; Swedish has several patterns.

The safest habit has three steps. Learn the noun together with its gender. Look up or memorize the plural form rather than guessing from spelling. Use patterns only as recognition aids, not as generators.

These are the patterns worth carrying in your head. Each one is numbered so the rest of the chapter can point back at it, and each shows how often it actually holds.

Some nouns ending in -el, -en, or -er lose an unstressed e when the plural ending is added.

Compare a neuter noun with zero plural:

The ending alone does not tell you which path to choose; check the plural in the dictionary for each word.

An umlaut here means that the stem vowel changes in the plural. These forms are common and worth learning as a recognition family:

The vowel change is not a productive rule for an unfamiliar noun. Each pair is worth learning as a whole.

The number två forces plural. The plural of bok is böcker; do not guess bokar by analogy.

The reliability figures in the pattern table are counts over Språkbanken's SALDO morphological lexicon, measured on 62,725 common nouns that have a fixed gender and a regular plural class. They are type counts — each dictionary entry counts once, regardless of how common the word is.

• Språkbanken Text, SALDO's morphology — the lexicon the counts are taken from.
• Holmes, P. & Hinchliffe, I., Swedish: A Comprehensive Grammar, 3rd edition — the declension classes and the prediction rules the patterns above are based on.
• Svenska Akademiens grammatik — the seven-class system that newer reference grammars follow.
• Ahlberg, M., Forsberg, M. & Hulden, M., Semi-supervised learning of morphological paradigms and lexicons, EACL 2014 — on why spelling alone cannot settle a noun's paradigm.

Next: use the plural you learned in Definite Plurals and Possession.