Gender in Danish and Swedish

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Standard Danish and Swedish have two grammatical genders for nouns: common and neuter. Pronouns for people use natural gender (he, she) just like English, while pronouns for objects and animals follow the noun’s gender. Noun endings and pronouns in some contexts still show the old system, but today the two-gender system is the core.

A long time ago Danish and Swedish had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Over time masculine and feminine merged into the common gender. For a while, pronouns still marked the old distinctions: han for masculine nouns and hon/hun for feminine nouns. Eventually, inanimate nouns were treated as “it” (den or det), and han/hun became mainly for living beings with biological gender.

Different dialects can keep different endings and patterns. In North Germanic languages, the definite form is usually a suffix on the noun, not a separate word, and it is not normally used for people.

Today there is debate about gender-neutral language. In Swedish, hen is used by some people for a gender-neutral pronoun and was added to the Swedish dictionary in 2015. In Danish, there is no widely used gender-neutral pronoun. Danish translations exist but are not common. Danish and Swedish are very similar overall, though dialects differ. Norwegian is similar but has three standard genders; some dialects use two.