We have already covered how German has a case structure (Part 2) and how each noun has a gender (Part 3). Now we are going to look at another topic, and that is “number”. Used grammatically, it simply means that German has singular and plural forms.
Just like in English (and like a lot of languages), the singular form and the plural form of a noun is shown in different ways. In English, we say we have the dog, but when have more than one, we have the dogs. Note that the plural of “dog” is “dogs” (with an “s” at the end).
German also can show plural with an ending, and this a very typical way of distinguishing between singular and plural. There is, however, one addition detail to forming the plural in German, and that is with the article – which we looked at in part 3. We only looked at singular versions though, so now it is time to explore the plural article.
Plural Form In German
Recall our example of “the dog” and “the dogs” above. Now we will put this into German:
Singular: der Hund
Plural: die Hunde
2 things have changed here. First, the noun “Hund” gets an ending, just like in English. The “e” is a common plural form, though it is not the only one. Second, the article “der” has changed to “die”. This does not mean that “dog” changes genders; rather “die” is the article that is used for plural.
You can use “die” with all genders too. Unlike other languages that show gender AND number together, it is either one or the other in German. So, to recap on both article and gender, a noun will have an article that is either masculine, feminine, neutral or plural.
die Hunde [the dogs]
die Katzen [the cats]
die Bücher [the books]
Singular
der Hund [the dog]
die Katze [the cat]
das Buch [the book]
As you can see from the examples, the articles der/die/das have all changed to “die”. That is the plural form. The nouns also have endings, and from the examples above, you can see 3 common ways to form the plural. For “book”, it shows a generally common way of not only adding an ending, but also effecting the vowel. More about this later.
Part 5 will take a look at the past 3 sections: “case”, “gender”, and “number” – putting them all together to show how they influence different forms in German.
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