The Mongolian Plural, and When Not to Mark It

The default is no marking at all

Start with a sentence from the course, and with the fact that the course gives it two translations:

Оюутан францаар сайн ярьдаг.

student French-INS well speak-HAB

"The student speaks French well." / "The students speak French well."

Both readings are correct, and nothing in the sentence decides between them. Оюутан is not singular — it is unmarked, which is a different thing. It names the category student and leaves the question of how many open, exactly as English sheep or fish do. The difference is that in Mongolian this is the normal state of a noun rather than a handful of leftovers.

An English speaker's instinct is to treat the unmarked noun as a gap to be filled, and to reach for a plural suffix whenever more than one thing is involved. That instinct produces Mongolian that is not wrong so much as oddly insistent, like an English speaker saying the two of the books. The plural is marked when the plurality is itself the news, and left alone when it is not.

Where it is forbidden: after a number

This is the one hard rule on the page, and it goes in the opposite direction from English. When a number is present, the noun must stay unmarked. The number has already said how many; a plural suffix would be saying it twice.

• хоёр ном (two books)
• таван дэвтэр (five notebooks)
• гурван тасалбар (three tickets)
• найман иргэн (eight citizens)
• зуун үг (a hundred words)

Note найман иргэн in particular. иргэн has a perfectly good plural, иргэд, and after a number it is not used. The same applies to the word for how many: Гэрт хэдэн хүн байна вэ? (How many people are there in the ger?) keeps хүн bare, although the question is precisely about a quantity greater than one. The numbers themselves, with their two shapes and their ordinals, are on the page on numbers.

What this does not forbid is a plural elsewhere in the same sentence. Here the subject is marked and the counted noun is not:

Оюутнууд гурван ном авсан.

student-PL three book take-PAST

"The students took three books."

Two nouns, one plural suffix, and it is on the one that no number governs.

When marking it does earn its place

If the default is silence, the question becomes what makes a speaker break it. Three situations account for most of the marked plurals you will meet.

When the group is a definite set of people. Nouns for human beings are far more often marked than nouns for things, and the suffixes reflect that: two of the six in the table below exist only for people. Оюутнууд гурван ном авсан is about particular students, not about students in general, and the suffix is what says so.

When nothing else in the sentence gives the number. A number, a quantity word or the surrounding context will usually have done the job already, and then the suffix is redundant. When none of them is present and the plurality matters to what you are saying, the suffix carries it alone.

When the plural word is the name of a collective. монголчууд (the Mongols) and Европчууд (Europeans) are not simply several Mongols and several Europeans; they are the peoples, treated as entities. Here the plural is not an arithmetical statement at all, and leaving it off would change the meaning rather than merely under-specify it.

What you will not find is a rule that settles every case. The plural in Mongolian is closer to an English speaker's choice between the police and the policemen than to the automatic -s: a decision about how you are presenting the thing, not a box that has to be ticked. That is why reading is a better teacher here than any table, and why the table below is offered for recognition rather than for drilling.

The suffixes

There are more of these than a beginner wants, and they are not interchangeable at will. The honest way to learn them is to learn the plural of each noun as part of the noun, the way you learn an irregular English plural, while recognising the patterns well enough to read a word you have never seen.

And one noun to memorise on its own, because it is the most frequent noun in the group and it follows nothing: хүн (person) gives хүмүүс (people).

Which vowel the plural suffix wears is not open to choice — –ууд against –үүд, –чууд against –чүүд — and it is settled by the same rule that settles most suffixes in the language, on the vowel harmony page.

нар is not a suffix, and it does not mean the same thing

нар is written as a word of its own, with a space in front of it, and the course is careful to say that it is not really a plural marker: it adds the idea of a body, a set of people taken together, often a profession. That is why эмч has two plural-like forms that are not synonyms. эмчид is several doctors. эмч нар is the medical profession.

It also attaches to pronouns, where no suffix would: Бид нар бэлэн (we are ready), Тэд нар буудалд байна (they are at the station). And because it is the last word of the group, it is the word that carries anything that follows — найз нар gives найз нартай (with friends) and then найз нартайгаа (with one's friends), with both the case and the reflexive possessive landing on нар and nothing at all on найз. The sequence those endings queue in is on the page on suffix order.

What changes inside the word

Three adjustments happen at the join, and all three are visible in the table above.

A final н drops before –д. This is the class the method singles out, and it is a large one, because н at the end of a Mongolian noun is often unstable.

• өвгөн → өвгөд (old men)
• эмгэн → эмгэд (old women)
• иргэн → иргэд (citizens)
• малчин → малчид (herders)

The same unstable н turns up again when these nouns take a case ending rather than a plural, and that is handled on the page on choosing a case ending. Here it is enough to notice that малчид is not an irregular plural: it is the regular one, once you know the н goes.

A linking consonant appears before –ууд / –үүд. You cannot simply butt the suffix against a vowel, so a letter is inserted: н in ширээнүүд, тэмээнүүд and далайнууд, г in мөрөнгүүд and ангууд. The general behaviour of these linking letters is on the page on how a word is built.

A short vowel in the last syllable can drop. оюутан (student) gives оюутнууд, and эрдэмтэн (scholar) gives эрдэмтнүүд. The vowel that disappears is one that was barely pronounced in the first place, which is a recurring fact about Mongolian spelling and is taken up on the page on spoken against written Mongolian.

One plural per word, and nothing else agrees with it

A noun carries at most one plural marker. English speakers do not usually try to stack two, but they do try to make other words match, and in Mongolian nothing matches.

• Adjectives do not agree. шинэ ном is a new book or new books; шинэ is the same in both. See the adjectives page.
• Demonstratives do not agree. энэ covers this and these: see the demonstratives page.
• The verb does not agree. In Оюутнууд гурван ном авсан the verb is авсан, which is the same form you would use with one student, with you, or with me. See the verbs page.

So the plural suffix is a piece of information deposited once, in one place, and never echoed. That is the whole reason it can be left out so often: nothing downstream is waiting for it.

Reading a plural you have not seen

The practical use of the table is not production but reading. When a word defeats your dictionary, check whether the end of it is one of these suffixes and strip it. Европчуудад looks formidable and is three pieces: the stem Европ, the people-plural –чууд, and a case ending, giving to the Europeans — which is how the course uses it, in Европчуудад Монголын амьдралын өртөг их өндөр биш (for Europeans the cost of living in Mongolia is not very high).

Two cautions on stripping. A word ending in –с or –д is not necessarily plural — –д is also the dative-locative case ending, and context, not spelling, tells them apart. And a plural is not a case: it says how many, not what the word is doing in the sentence. That second job is always carried by whatever comes after the plural.