Luke from Sydney had a question about verbs. He wanted to know if all Swedish verbs end in “a” – that is something I briefly touched upon in the Swedish verbs part 2 post a while back.

So let’s review:

No, not all Swedish verbs end in “a.” Some end in other vowels. And some end in “s.” But it does indeed seem like almost all Swedish verbs have the “a” ending, simply because the great majority of them ends in “a.”

So, what are the verbs that end in other vowels? Those are those short, irregular verbs that I mentioned in the post referenced above.

Some of those verbs end in “e” – for example:

• se – to see
• ge – to give
• be – to beg/request
• le – to smile

A few end in “å” – for example:

• gå – to go
• må – to feel (when talking about health)
• stå – to stand
• få – to get/receive
• slå – to hit/ to strike

And a few end in other vowels:

• sy – to sew
• bo – to live/reside
• dö – to die
• tro – to believe/ to think
• bli – to become
• klä – to dress
• fly – to flee

But then there are also other verbs that don’t end in a vowel. Instead, they end in “s.”
These are funky little verbs that normally bring quite a lot of grief to Swedish learners. Why? Some verbs get “s” at the end to express a passive voice. But some have that “s” ending and are not passive in meaning. Such verbs that are passive in form, but active in meaning are called deponent verbs, and unfortunately Swedish is full of them.

Below are some of the most common ones:

• hoppas – to hope
• minnas – to remember, recall
• andas – to breathe
• finnas – to be (exist) – probably the most common of the bunch, You will see it in plenty of expressions, such as for example: Det finns + noun – There is + noun.
• trivas – to feel at home, to get along

And there are many more.

So as you can see, not all Swedish verbs end in “a” even though it may seem so at first.