Must, Have to, Need to, Don’t Have to, Needn’t modal verbs Should, Shouldn’t, Ought To modal verbs

normal verb
modal verb
affirmative	he works	he can work
negation	he does not work	he cannot work
emphatic	he does work hard	he can work hard
question	does he work here?	can he work at all?
negation + question	does he not work here?	can he not work at all?

(German, Afrikaans, and West Frisian never use "do" as an auxiliary verb for any function; Low Saxon and Dutch use "do" as an auxiliary, but only in colloquial speech in Dutch, whereas in Low Saxon it is of very common use, sometimes to a point where it is comparable to the way the English makes use of it).

Comparison with other Germanic languages[edit]

The English modal verbs share many features and often etymology with modal verbs in other Germanic languages.
The table below lists some modal verbs with common roots in the West Germanic languages English, German, Dutch, Low Saxon, West Frisian and Afrikaans, the North Germanic languages Danish, Swedish and Faroese, and the extinct East Germanic Gothic language. This list comprises cognates, which evolved from old Germanic modal auxiliaries. It does not attempt to be complete for any one of the modern languages, as some verbs have lost or gained modal character later in separate languages. (English modal auxiliary verb provides an exhaustive list of modal verbs in English, and German verb#Modal verbs provides a list for German, with translations. Dutch verbs#Irregular verbs gives conjugations for some Dutch modals.)
Words in the same row of the table below share the same etymological root. Because of semantic drift, however, words in the same row may no longer be proper translations of each other. For instance, the English and German verbs will are completely different in meaning, and the German one has nothing to do with constructing the future tense. These words are false friends.
In (modern) English, Afrikaans, Danish, and Swedish, the plural and singular forms are identical. For German, Dutch, Low Saxon, West Frisian, Faroese and Gothic, both a (not the) plural and a singular form of the verb are shown. Forms within parentheses are obsolete, rare, and/or mainly dialectal in the modern languages.