Declension of `мать` in plural

Question

Can someone show me the declension for мать in all the cases plurals?

Answer 1

Well, the only irregularity here is that мать - changes to матер - and then just a regular suffix added - the same one what we have in боль, тетрадь, соль - that is, all feminine nouns ending at -ь.

Those words traditionally are classified as belonging to the 3rd declension, which in plural has following endings:

• Nom. -и (obsolete -я)
• Gen. -ей
• Acc. -ей
• Dat. -ям
• Inst. -ями
• Prep. -ях

This classification is pretty rough though, and Russian linguist Zaliznyak came up with a more precise classification which is de-facto pretty much adopted by the linguistics community.

According to this classification, word мать belongs to 8e^ category, where:

• the number eight corresponds to the 3rd in traditional classification
• letter e indicates that for any case except nominative the suffix is stressed, not the root
• the ^ symbol indicates that this particular noun still has some kind of peculiar properties. In our particular case, it's exactly мат → матер transformation.

By the way, there's other example of 8e^ - дочь in plural becomes дочери.

What can stop you from asking a question about declension of any Russian word you are interested in? Refer to the Russian wiktionary (this information quite often is omitted in the English one:

Answer 2

Им.ма'тери Род.матере'й Дат.матеря'м Вин.матере'й, Тв.матеря'ми, Предл.о матеря'х.

That's the declension of the word мать(singular)– матери (plural ).