Person and Number Endings

Every Icelandic verb, in every tense, carries an ending that tells you who the subject is and how many of them there are. These person-and-number endings are remarkably stable: the same small set recurs across the whole verb system. Learn them once, attach them to a stem, and you can conjugate verbs you have never seen. This page isolates those endings so you can drill them on their own. How a verb forms its tenses (weak versus strong, present versus past) belongs to the tense pages; here we care only about the endings that ride on top.

The six slots

Icelandic distinguishes three persons (I / you / he-she-it) in two numbers (singular and plural), giving six conjugation slots. The endings for the present of a regular verb, shown on kalla ("call, shout"), are:

So the bare skeleton is -∅ / -r / -r / -um / -ið / -a. Notice two things that English does not prepare you for. First, the 2nd and 3rd person singular are identical — both kallar. "You call" and "she calls" look and sound exactly the same; the pronoun does the disambiguating. Second, the "we" form is not kallum but köllum — the stem vowel a has rounded to ö. We come back to that below, because it is the single thing learners most often get wrong.

The hidden u-umlaut in "we"

Here is the rule competitors gloss over. The 1st person plural ending is -um, and that u is a u-umlaut trigger: whenever the stem vowel is a, the -um ending rounds it forward to ö. So:

• kalla → við köllum
• tala → við tölum
• vakna → við vöknum
• baka → við bökum

This is not an irregularity you memorise verb by verb. It is a regular sound rule of the language, and — the insight worth holding onto — it is exactly the same rule that operates in nouns. The dative plural of nouns also ends in -um and also rounds a to ö: barn → börnum ("to the children"), land → löndum ("to the countries"). Verb morphology and noun morphology share one mechanism. If you can see löndum and köllum as the same phenomenon, you have understood something deep about Icelandic rather than memorising two unrelated facts.

If the stem vowel is not a, there is nothing to round, and -um simply attaches: lesa → lesum, reyna → reynum. The umlaut only bites when there is an a available to round.

Strong verbs: same endings, a moving stem

Strong verbs use the same person-number endings — that is the whole point of learning the endings on their own. What differs is that many strong verbs change their stem vowel in the singular present (a separate process from the umlaut). Take taka ("take"):

Look at what changed and what did not. The endings are still -∅/-r/-r/-um/-ið/-a — the 1sg tek is bare, the 2/3sg tekur carries -r, the 2pl takið carries -ið. The novelties are stem-vowel shifts: the singular shows e (tek, tekur) where the plural shows a (takið, taka), and the -um form again rounds its a to ö (tökum), the very same umlaut as in köllum. So a strong verb stacks two things on the shared endings: a singular stem-vowel change, and (when an a is present) the 1pl umlaut. Which verbs change their stem vowel, and how, is the business of the strong-verb page. Here, just register that the ending set is constant and the stem is what moves.

The 1sg: bare or not

One caveat keeps the picture honest. The 1st person singular is bare for the kalla/tala type (ég kalla, ég tala) and for strong verbs (ég tek, ég kem), but some weak verbs take -i in the 1sg instead: ég reyni ("I try"), ég dæmi ("I judge"). So the very first slot is the one place the ending genuinely varies by verb class — the other five slots (-r, -r, -um, -ið, -a) are stable. The weak-verb page sorts out which class is which; the safe takeaway here is that the 2sg through 3pl endings are reliable, and only the 1sg occasionally swaps -∅ for -i.

Common Mistakes

Dropping the -r in the 2nd/3rd singular is the most frequent ending error, because English has no agreement ending on "you." The -r is obligatory: þú talar, hann talar.

The 1pl -um triggers u-umlaut. Talum with a plain a is wrong; it must be tölum, just as kalla gives köllum.

A strong verb's stem-vowel change does not replace the ending. The 3sg still carries -r: hann tekur, not hann tek. (Only the ég form is bare: ég tek.)

The 2pl ending is -ið, written with eth (ð) and no accent on the i. Kallíð misspells it.

Key Takeaways

• The six endings, in order, are -∅ / -r / -r / -um / -ið / -a — recite them as a chant and they transfer to every verb.
• The 2sg and 3sg are identical (talar = "you speak" and "she speaks"); context tells them apart.
• The 1pl -um rounds stem a→ö (kalla → köllum, taka → tökum) — the very same u-umlaut that gives nouns börnum and löndum.
• Strong verbs use the same endings; they merely move the stem vowel in the singular (taka → tek, tekur). The ending set never changes.
• Only the 1sg varies by class — bare (ég kalla) or -i (ég reyni); slots 2 through 6 are reliable.