Norwegian nouns handle the word “the” very differently than English.

Instead of placing a separate word before the noun, Norwegian attaches a specific ending to the word itself.

This means that “the car” literally translates to “car-the” when speaking Norwegian.

Learning these specific noun endings is a core part of building proper sentences.

I’ll show you the exact rules for creating definite and indefinite nouns in Norwegian.

Norwegian noun genders

Before you can add the correct endings to a noun, you need to know its gender.

Norwegian has three grammatical genders for nouns.

These genders are masculine, feminine, and neuter.

Every single noun in the Norwegian language belongs to one of these three categories.

The gender of the noun dictates exactly which endings you must use for both the singular and plural forms.

Indefinite singular nouns

The indefinite form of a noun is what we use when saying “a” or “an” in English.

In Norwegian, this indefinite article is placed right before the noun.

The word you use depends entirely on the gender of the noun.

We use en for masculine nouns.

We use ei for feminine nouns.

We use et for neuter nouns.

Definite singular endings

The definite form of a noun is what we use when saying “the” in English.

As mentioned earlier, Norwegian doesn’t use a standalone word for “the”.

Instead, you take the indefinite article and attach it to the end of the noun as a suffix.

For masculine nouns, you add -en to the end of the word.

For feminine nouns, you add -a to the end of the word.

For neuter nouns, you add -et to the end of the word.

When pronouncing the definite neuter ending -et, the letter ‘t’ is completely silent.

You pronounce huset exactly as if it were spelled “huse”.

Plural noun endings

Making nouns plural in Norwegian also requires specific endings based on whether you’re being indefinite or definite.

The indefinite plural translates to “cars” or “houses”.

The definite plural translates to “the cars” or “the houses”.

For the vast majority of regular nouns, you form the indefinite plural by adding -er to the end of the word.

To form the definite plural, you add -ene to the end of the word.

This -ene ending is universally used for masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns.

There’s one major exception regarding short neuter nouns.

If a neuter noun is only one syllable long, it doesn’t get an ending in the indefinite plural form.

The word hus (house) is a perfect example of this rule.

One house is et hus, and multiple houses are simply hus.

However, it still takes the standard -ene ending for the definite plural.

Regional variations and the feminine gender

The Norwegian language features wide regional variations and two different written standards (Bokmål and Nynorsk).

The rules I’ve shown you are based on the standard Bokmål written language.

However, the feminine gender is actually optional in Bokmål.

Many Norwegians choose to treat all feminine nouns as masculine nouns.

This means that instead of writing ei jente and jenta, they’ll write en jente and jenten.

This two-gender system (common and neuter) is standard practice in the city of Bergen.

It’s also very common in conservative Oslo dialects and formal written Bokmål.

When you learn Norwegian, you can choose whether to use the feminine endings or replace them with masculine ones.

Just make sure you stay consistent with your choice so your sentences sound natural.