skulle (shall/should — full paradigm)

This is the conjugation reference for skulle, the busiest modal in everyday Norwegian. Skal handles planned futures, obligations, arrangements, and even reported rumour — and it does all of this in registers where English speakers, scared off by the stiff, near-dead English "shall," tend to avoid it. Don't. This page gives the full paradigm and a map of the senses; for the evidential ("reportedly") use in depth, see skal / skulle: hearsay and evidence.

Principal parts

Skulle is a pure modal: the present has no -r ending, and there is no imperative. Note the doubled l in every form except the present skal.

One form per tense, every subject: jeg skal, du skal, hun skal, vi skal, dere skal, de skal.

Sense 1: planned future and intention

Skal marks something the subject plans or intends to do — a decided future. This is its single most common job, and it is where English would say "am going to" or "will."

The decision is what skal encodes. Jeg skal dra says the trip is planned and settled. Contrast this with vil (which would add desire) and the plain present (which would state a bare schedule).

Sense 2: obligation and instruction

Skal also imposes or reports an obligation — "is to," "is supposed to," "must." It is how rules, schedules, and instructions get phrased.

Sense 3: arrangements and suggestions

The first-person-plural question Skal vi…? is the standard way to suggest doing something together — exactly the niche English fills with "Shall we…?", except that in Norwegian it is completely everyday, not formal.

Sense 4: hearsay — skal være = "is said to be"

This is the sense with no clean English counterpart. Skal can mark information as reported rather than witnessed — "is said to," "is reportedly." The fixed phrase skal være means "is supposed to be / is reportedly."

Here the speaker is not making a plan or claim of their own — they are passing on what they've heard. English needs a whole frame ("is said to," "reportedly," "apparently"); Norwegian folds it into skal. See the evidential page for how skal and skulle split this work.

The infinitive = preterite trap, and skulle's wide past range

As with the other modals, the infinitive skulle and the preterite skulle are identical in form. The preterite is unusually rich: it covers "was going to," "was supposed to," and "should (have)" — a much wider range than English "should."

The first skulle is "was going to" (a plan that fell through); the second is "should have" (regret about an unfulfilled obligation). The supine skullet turns up mainly in the perfect — vi har skullet reise i flere år ("we've been meaning to travel for years") — which is grammatical but rare; in everyday speech the simple preterite skulle covers almost all of this ground.

The bare-infinitive rule

After skulle in any form, the next verb is a bare infinitive, no å.

skulle in polite requests and wishes

The preterite skulle also softens, much like kunne and ville. Jeg skulle gjerne… is the idiomatic way to say "I'd love to / I'd like to," and skulle ønske is the fixed frame for a wish you know to be counterfactual.

Skulle ønske is worth memorising as a unit — it is the everyday "I wish," and it is followed by a clause in the preterite (jeg skulle ønske jeg hadde tid, "I wish I had time"), mirroring the English past-tense-after-wish pattern exactly.

Register notes

Skal and skulle are register-neutral and among the most frequent words in Norwegian — do not avoid them out of "shall"-anxiety.

• Skal for a planned future is the default in speech; flat-present and kommer til å are alternatives, but skal is the unmarked choice when there's a decision behind the future.
• The hearsay skal (sense 4) is common in news writing and gossip alike — politiet skal ha funnet våpenet ("police are said to have found the weapon") keeps the reporter at a careful distance from an unconfirmed claim.

Common Mistakes