bilarna

Bilarna, literally “the cars,” is the definite plural form of the Swedish noun bil, meaning car. In Swedish, nouns are inflected for number and definiteness, with the indefinite plural form bilar and the definite plural form bilarna. The definite form is used when the cars being referred to are specific or already known from context.

The definite plural bilarna is commonly encountered in everyday speech and writing. It denotes a particular set of cars rather than cars in general. For example, in the sentence Bilarna står parkerade utanför huset means “The cars are parked outside the house,” with the listener presumed to know which cars are being discussed. Another example is De bilarna som står utanför garaget är svenska märken, which emphasizes the identified cars in question.

Bilarna can also function within noun phrases alongside adjectives or relative clauses, just like other definite nouns in Swedish. For instance, Bilarna i garaget är nya can be translated as “The cars in the garage are new.” The word forms differ from the indefinite plural bilar, which would appear in nonspecific contexts, such as Fyra bilar var inblandade, meaning “Four cars were involved,” where the definite article is not used.

Linguistically, bilarna illustrates how Swedish marks definiteness in plural nouns with suffixes rather than separate determiners in many contexts. The term is a neutral, descriptive element of the language, primarily used to refer to a known or specified group of vehicles within discourse.