In standard
Danish and
Swedish, nouns have two
grammatical genders, and pronouns have the same two grammatical genders in addition to two
natural genders similar to
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
.
Overview
Historically, nouns in standard Danish and Swedish, like other
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...
, had one of three
grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
s: 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 merge is incomplete, with some vestiges in
pronouns
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...
. Swedish also has deviations from a complete common gender. Danish has no such vestiges since unlike Dutch and German, it does not use the same pronouns for objects and people, but like English, it has ''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 those languages have separate numbers of grammatical genders from only one to up to three.
Norwegian, while similar to those languages, uses three genders in its standard versions, but some dialects, like that of
Bergen
Bergen (), historically Bjørgvin, is a city and municipalities of Norway, municipality in Vestland county on the Western Norway, west coast of Norway. , its population is roughly 285,900. Bergen is the list of towns and cities in Norway, secon ...
and the
Riksmål dialect of
Bokmål
Bokmål () (, ; ) is an official written standard for the Norwegian language, alongside Nynorsk. Bokmål is the preferred written standard of Norwegian for 85% to 90% of the population in Norway. Unlike, for instance, the Italian language, there ...
, use two.
History and dialects
Around 1300 CE, Danish had three grammatical genders. Masculine nouns formed definite versions with ''-in'' (e.g.: — the day, — the horse), feminine with ''-æn'' ( - the woman, — the nose), and neuter with either ''-æt'' or ''-it'' ( - the child, - the ship). In some dialects, like East
Jutlandic
Jutlandic, or Jutish (Danish: ''jysk''; ), is the western variety of Danish, spoken on the peninsula of Jutland in Denmark.
Generally, Jutlandic can be divided into two different dialects: general or Northern Jutlandic ( ; further divided in ...
, Copenhagen and
Stockholm
Stockholm () is the capital and largest city of Sweden as well as the largest urban area in Scandinavia. Approximately 980,000 people live in the municipality, with 1.6 million in the urban area, and 2.4 million in the metropo ...
, the ''-in'' and ''-æn'' suffixes merged to ''-en'' forms thereby losing the distinction in definite endings between the two. Nonetheless, pronouns continued to distinguish between the grammatical genders for some time, as ''han'' referred to nouns of the masculine gender, and likewise (Da.) / (Swedish) was used for nouns of the feminine gender.
During the
Early modern period, this last distinction disappeared as well, as inanimates and beings perceived as lacking biological gender came to be referred to with a new pronoun ("it"), originally a demonstrative meaning "that", and and became reserved for beings perceived as having biological gender, like English ''he'' and ''she''.
Other dialects have kept the gender distinction in the definite suffixes, like
Insular Danish in which only the feminine suffix became ''-en'' while masculine form lost the ''n'' and became ''-i'' ( - the day, - the cat), wnd Norwegian and most Swedish dialects in which the masculine suffix became ''-en'' but the feminine suffix lost the ''n'' and became ''-a'' ( — the mother).
Grammar
Pronouns
Like in English, accusative and dative cases are merged to one
objective case
In grammar, an oblique (abbreviated ; from la, casus obliquus) or objective case (abbr. ) is a nominal case other than the nominative case, and sometimes, the vocative.
A noun or pronoun in the oblique case can generally appear in any role ex ...
and is only marked on
object pronoun
In linguistics, an object pronoun is a personal pronoun that is used typically as a grammatical object: the direct or indirect object of a verb, or the object of a preposition. Object pronouns contrast with subject pronouns. Object pronouns in E ...
s.
Articles
North Germanic languages use a definite suffix (or
enclitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
article) instead of a definite article, except when a
preposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
is attached to the noun, then a definite article is placed in front. Because these normally attach to common nouns and not
proper noun
A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa'', ''Jupiter'', '' Sarah'', ''Microsoft)'' as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, ...
s, they are usually not used for people. The only exceptions are as an
epithet
An epithet (, ), also byname, is a descriptive term (word or phrase) known for accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage. It has various shades of meaning when applied to seemingly real or fictitious people, di ...
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
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a va ...
for people. This is used in some places in Sweden. The Danish translation is added in parentheses, but is not actually used, and lacks objective and possessive versions. In 2015, was introduced in
SAOL, the word list (
spelling dictionary) of the
Swedish Academy
The Swedish Academy ( sv, Svenska Akademien), founded in 1786 by King Gustav III, is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden. Its 18 members, who are elected for life, comprise the highest Swedish language authority. Outside Scandinavia, it is bes ...
.
See also
*
Danish grammar
*
Swedish grammar
Swedish is descended from Old Norse. Compared to its progenitor, Swedish grammar is much less characterized by inflection. Modern Swedish has two genders and no longer conjugates verbs based on person or number. Its nouns have lost the morphol ...
*
Grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
*
English personal pronouns
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and natural gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors descri ...
*
Gender in Dutch grammar
In the Dutch language, the gender of a noun determines the articles, adjective forms and pronouns that are used in reference to that noun. Gender is a complicated topic in Dutch, because depending on the geographical area or each individual spea ...
References
{{Reflist
Danish grammar
Swedish language
Grammatical gender