2163: Germanic Plural Endings: How -R is Related to -S

In English, non-rhoticity—the loss of /r/ before a consonant or at the end of a word—initially was process that affected by [s] only, thus leading to ‘bass’ from the Old English ‘bærs’, among others, as explained in the video about English vs. American R’s. A process not so conceptually different to this also establishes the connection between the Dutch plural ending -s and the Scandinavian -r plurals, but the process went the other way around. This is to say that the most common pluralizing ending across Germanic languages today is -s but that it has become an -r in Swedish, though to be clear there have always been Germanic inflectional endings of different varieties, including commonly -en (e.g. ox-oxen; Haus-Hausen), internal vowel changes (e.g. tooth-teeth), and -er (Buch-Bücher). Indeed, the -s ending that is now the overwhelmingly dominant form in English was only used for a many masculine nouns, and not for feminine or neuter, making up less than half therefore but still a plurality. So effectively as English used -s more to to others being pushed out, Swedish used plural -s less due to the rhoticity.