Which plural form is more common: Pizzas or Pizzen?

Question

I have just realized that the noun "die Pizza" has two different plural forms. Which is more common?

• Pizzas
• Pizzen

Answer 1

Short answer: Pizzen

But Pizzas is also absolutely correct.

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In detail:

The German noun Pizza has two different plural forms, that both are correct:

German:
eine Pizza, zwei Pizzas, zwei Pizzen

This word is an Italian loanword. The Italian plural is »pizze«:

Italian:
una pizza, due pizze

Some people think you have to learn Italien grammar when you want to order more than one pizza, but this is wrong. Nobody needs to learn the grammar of a foreign language to use a foreign word or a loan word in the own language. But there are still some people who use the Italian plural in German sentences too, so you also can find the Italian plural too.

Most often just the singular form is used, as you can see in this Google Ngram. There you also can see, that Pizza is a relatively new member of the German vocabulary. It's usage before 1970 is not worth mentioning, and how it developed since then is depicted here:

^source

But the question was about the frequency of the plural forms, and this is better visible without the singular form:

^source

You can see, that before 1994 the version »Pizzas« was more frequently used than »Pizzen«. Let's zoom in into that era:

^source

From 1994 to 2007 both versions was used with almost identical frequencies, but since 2007 the version »Pizzen« has developed much more than »Pizzas«, and so, today »Pizzen« is the most frequently used plural form of »Pizza«.

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All what has been said here is true for German language that was printed in books (and some magazines). More precisely: The corpus from which these data are extracted is everything that Google has scanned so far (which is a lot!). But this corpus does not contain other forms of written German (websites, chats, etc.) and it contains not a single spoken word. But sometimes spoken German can differ strongly from written German. But I think that in this special case (plural of Pizza) there is not a big difference between the Google corpus and the rest of German language.

But you have to keep another effect in mind: Obviously there is a trend to write more about food in general that is increasing since the last 20 years, as you can read from this diagram:

^source

I don't think, that people talk more about food than they did before, but maybe the number of cookbooks is increasing in that time.

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Another aspect always has the be considered: There are often big regional differences in such cases, in most cases between northern and southern regions of the German speaking area, but sometimes also between west and east. I honestly have no idea, if this applies to the plural forms of Pizza too.

And there is another source of differences: The age of the speaker. As was shown above, there was a time in the not so far past, where »Pizzas« was more often used than »Pizzen«. But most people do not change the vocabulary they have learned as children or when they were young adults when they grow older. So I think, that among older people you probably might find more people saying »Pizzas« than »Pizzen«.

Answer 2

DWDS has even a third plural form pizze, which they mark as rarely used. Without trying to confirm by search engine counts I consider the other two as in the same order of magnitude, but as commented, language is dynamic.

Pizzen, being inspired by the Italian plural, may be more frequently used by people with more education or more language affinity, but essentially the choice is yours. (In respect to words I am very reluctant to infer something from the frequency of use, especially not quality.)