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 similar merging happened in Dutch. The difference to Dutch is that Danish and Swedish has separate natural gender personal pronouns, which means no hidden distinction between previously masculine or feminine common gender nouns is needed for the personal pronoun.

While standard Danish and Swedish are very similar in the 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.

Grammar

Pronouns

Articles

North Germanic languages use a definite suffix instead of a definite article, except when a preposition is attached 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 arrises 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.^[1] This is used in some places in Sweden. The Danish translation is added in parenthesis, but is not actually used, and lacks an objective and possessive versions.^[2]

See also

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

References