Gender in Danish and Swedish

The distribution of one, two, and three grammatical genders in Danish dialects. In Zealand the transition from three to two genders has happened fairly recently. West of the red line the definite article goes before the word as in English or German; east of the line it takes the form of a suffix.

In Danish and Swedish, nouns have two grammatical genders, and additionally people have two natural genders similar to English.

Overview

Historically, nouns in Danish and Swedish, like other Germanic languages, had one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, or neuter. Over time the feminine and masculine genders merged into a common gender. A common gender is also partly used in some variants of Dutch, but in Dutch the merging is not complete, with some vestiges in pronouns. Danish and Swedish have no such vestiges, since they unlike Dutch and German do not use the same pronouns for objects and people, but like English have natural gender personal pronouns for people, and separate grammatical gender pronouns for objects and animals.

Whereas standard Danish and Swedish are very similar in regard to noun genders, many dialects of Danish and Swedish have separate numbers of grammatical genders, from only one, and up to three. Norwegian while similar to Danish and Swedish, uses three genders in its two standard versions, but some dialects, like that of Bergen, and the Riksmål dialect of Bokmål uses two.

History and dialects

Around 1300 Danish had three grammatical genders. Masculine nouns formed definite versions with -in (e.g.: dawin — the day, hæstin — the horse), feminine with -æn (kunæn - the woman, næsæn — the nose), and neuter with either -æt or -it (barnæt - the child, skipit - the ship). In some dialects, like East Jutlandic, Copenhagen and Stockholm, the -in and -æn suffixes merged to -en forms thereby losing the distinction between the two.^[1] Other dialects kept the distinction, like Insular Danish, where only the feminine suffix became -en while masculine form lost the n and became -i (dawi - the day, katti - the cat), or Norwegian and North Swedish where the masculine definite suffix became -en, but feminine lost the n and became -a (mora/måma — the mother).

Grammar

Pronouns

Like in English, accusative and dative cases are merged to one objective case and is only marked on object pronouns.

Articles

North Germanic languages use a definite suffix (or enclitic article) instead of a definite article, except when a preposition is attached to the noun, then a definite article is placed in front. Because these normally attach to common nouns and not proper nouns, they are usually not used for people. The only exceptions are as an epithet or a description, in which case the definite article for the common gender is used.

Neutral natural gender

Due to using natural genders for people, a problem arises when discussing a person of unknown or undefined gender. Traditionally the masculine pronouns have been used in that case, but that has caused some concern about cultural sexism. As a solution some feminists in Sweden have proposed to add a third class of gender-neutral pronouns for people.^[2] This is used in some places in Sweden. The Danish translation is added in parenthesis, but is not actually used, and lacks objective and possessive versions.^[3] In 2015, hen was introduced in SAOL, the glossary of the Swedish Academy.^[4]

See also

• Danish grammar
• Swedish grammar
• Grammatical gender
• English personal pronouns
• Gender in Dutch grammar

References