German noun plurals and the umlaut

English adds -s and stops. German has five different plural endings, and there is no rule that reliably predicts which noun takes which. The honest advice is the same as for gender: learn the plural together with the noun and its article, as one three-part item — der Tisch, die Tische.

The good news is that every plural, whatever its ending, takes die in the nominative. Gender disappears in the plural, so there is one article instead of three.

The five endings

The patterns that do hold

A few tendencies are reliable enough to lean on, and they cover a large share of the vocabulary you meet at A1.

• •Feminine nouns take -n or -en almost without exception: die Blume → die Blumen, die Zeitung → die Zeitungen.
• •Anything ending in -ung, -heit, -keit, -schaft or -ion takes -en. These are all feminine, so this is the rule above in a more usable form.
• •Nouns ending in -e take -n: die Lampe → die Lampen, der Junge → die Jungen.
• •Masculine and neuter nouns ending in -er, -en or -el usually add nothing: der Löffel → die Löffel. Sometimes they add an umlaut instead: der Apfel → die Äpfel.
• •Words that came into German from elsewhere take -s: das Handy → die Handys, das Baby → die Babys.

The umlaut

Many plurals add an umlaut to the vowel — a becomes ä, o becomes ö, u becomes ü. It can come with an ending or instead of one, and it never appears on e or i.

• der Apfel → die Äpfel

  apple → apples

  umlaut alone, no ending

• der Baum → die Bäume

  tree → trees

  umlaut plus -e

• das Haus → die Häuser

  house → houses

  umlaut plus -er

• die Mutter → die Mütter

  mother → mothers

  one of the few feminine nouns that does not take -n

Saying it out loud

You will need to spell things on the phone and at counters far sooner than you expect — your name, your street, your email. German has names for the letters that English does not have, and knowing them turns a stuck conversation into a short one.

• •ä, ö, ü are said “a-Umlaut”, “o-Umlaut”, “u-Umlaut”.
• •ß is “Eszett”, or “scharfes S”. If you cannot type it, ss is the accepted substitute.
• •Where umlauts are unavailable — an email address, a form that will not take them — write ae, oe, ue: Müller becomes Mueller.
• •A doubled letter is “Doppel-”: Doppel-n, Doppel-s. Faster than saying the letter twice.
• •“Wie schreibt man das?” is the question to ask, and “Können Sie das buchstabieren?” asks someone else to spell it.

One extra -n in the dative

In the dative plural the noun takes an extra -n on top of its plural form: die Kinder → mit den Kindern, die Bäume → unter den Bäumen. Plurals that already end in -n or -s are left alone — mit den Frauen, mit den Autos.

Common mistakes

• ✗die Fraus

  ✓die Frauen

  -s is for borrowings. Feminine German nouns take -n or -en almost always.

• ✗Zwei Biere, bitte.

  ✓Zwei Bier, bitte.

  Measures and quantities stay singular after a number when you are ordering. Die Biere is grammatical but means kinds of beer, which is not what the person behind the counter is asking.

• ✗die Äpfeln

  ✓die Äpfel

  Apfel takes an umlaut and no ending. Adding -n as well gives you the dative plural form by mistake.

• ✗mit den Kinder

  ✓mit den Kindern

  The dative plural adds -n to the noun. This is the one place a plural changes shape again.

• ✗die Zeitungs

  ✓die Zeitungen

  Everything ending in -ung takes -en. This group is large and completely regular, so it is worth knowing as a rule.