Quantitative Er (Of Them)

The fourth job of er is the most genuinely invisible to English speakers, because there is nothing in English to translate into it. When you count or quantify something and leave the noun out — "I have three," "I'll take one," "there are still two" — Dutch refuses to leave the slot empty. It inserts a quantitative er meaning roughly "of them," sitting just before the number or quantifier: Ik heb er twee ("I have two of them"). This er is obligatory. Drop it and the sentence sounds maimed to a Dutch ear — Ik heb twee lands like "I have two" trailing off into nothing. And because English simply says "three" and stops, English speakers have no word in their own sentence to remind them the er is missing. That is the whole difficulty: it's not hard to understand, it's hard to remember, because nothing prompts it.

This page is about quantitative er — "of them" with counted things. The er that introduces an indefinite subject (Er staan veel mensen) is the existential one, on Existential er; the two can appear together, which we cover at the end.

The rule: drop the noun, keep the er

When a number (twee, drie) or a quantifier (geen, genoeg, een paar, veel, een) refers back to a previously mentioned countable noun and that noun is not repeated, Dutch puts er before the quantity. The er recovers the dropped noun — "two of them."

The position is fixed: quantitative er sits in the middle field, after the finite verb and any object pronouns, right before the quantity word. It never opens the clause and never carries stress — like the other weak er's, it's backgrounded.

Why English speakers can't feel it

In English, a bare quantity standing in for a noun is complete on its own: "How many do you want?" — "Three." The noun is gone and nothing fills its place; English has a zero pro-form here. So when an English speaker builds the Dutch sentence, their mental template is "Ik wil ... three" — and "three" is drie, full stop. There is no slot in their thought for an "of them" word, because their own language never had one. This is why quantitative er is forgotten far more often than it's misused: the error is an omission driven by the source language having nothing there.

When the noun is repeated, there is no er

The flip side clarifies the rule: if you keep the noun, there is nothing for er to recover, so it disappears. Er only appears when the noun is gone.

Hold these two side by side: Ik heb drie appels (noun kept, no er) vs. Ik heb er drie (noun dropped, er required). The presence of er is a direct signal that a noun has been elided. That makes a clean self-check: did I just drop the noun after a number? Then I need er.

The double er: Er zijn er nog twee

Now the case that looks like a typo and isn't. A single clause can need two different er's at once: an existential er (introducing an indefinite subject) and a quantitative er ("of them"). Dutch does not merge them — it writes both. The result is the perfectly correct Er zijn er nog twee ("There are still two of them").

Each er is doing a separate job in a separate slot: the first holds the subject position open (existential), the second recovers the dropped noun (quantitative). A learner who thinks er has one meaning panics at seeing it twice — but Er zijn er twee is not a stammer or a typo. It's two small machines running side by side. The word-order mechanics of this collapse are detailed on Er and Word Order.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Quantitative er = "of them," inserted before a number or quantifier when the noun is dropped (Ik heb er twee, Ik wil er geen).
• It is obligatory: a bare quantity standing in for a noun must carry er; Ik heb drie alone is ungrammatical.
• English has a zero pro-form here ("I have three") — nothing to translate — so the error is almost always omission, not misuse.
• Keep the noun → no er (Ik heb drie appels); drop the noun → er (Ik heb er drie). The er is the signal a noun was elided.
• Existential and quantitative er can co-occur without merging: Er zijn er nog twee is correct, not a typo — see Er and Word Order.