Pronoun In The Swedish Language

Hen: the New Pronoun in the Swedish Language

Sweden is well-known for its effort to create gender equality in the Swedish society, as is shown in the report of the World Economic Forum, where Sweden ranked 4th on gender equality in the areas heath, education, economy and politics. Only Iceland, Norway and Finland are ranked higher. (Global Gender Gap Report 2015 p. 8) However, this does not mean that the Swedes are resting on their laurels and stop working on their progress in gender equality and LGBT rights, which is made clear from the introduction of a new third person singular pronoun. This pronoun, hen, is used as a gender-neutral option for the Swedish equivalents of he and she. This paper is written in order to examine and get a general

Swedish already had pronouns to refer to men and women specifically, so it could be used instead of nouns with the corresponding natural gender, but hen is now introduced as an option in situations where the gender of the person is unknown, the person mentioned wishes to be called neither a man nor a woman, or when the speaker/writer does not want to give information about the gender of the person that is referred to (Sprakochfolkminnen.se). The table below contains the relevant pronouns, including their accusative and genitive form (Wagner; SAOL). The two neuter third person singular forms, the first and second singular forms, the indefinite forms, the plural forms and the reflexive forms are not shown. The analogous forms of the nominative in English of these pronouns are also

There are two explanations about how the new pronoun was formed. One is that the word is created by combining the h- from han and hon with the -en ending of one of the neuter forms den (comparable to the English ‘it’), but has been said that the more plausible explanation is that hen is borrowed from the Finnish language, where hän is the only third person singular pronoun and used for both genders. (Milles, p. 27) Originally, the male pronoun was used ubiquitously in many documents to refer to both men and women, just like in English (Milles). However, in 1966, the linguist Rolf Dunås mentioned it in the Swedish newspaper Upsala Nya Tidning, which was during the second wave of feminism and around the same time that the generic usage of the male pronoun han became politically incorrect (Bäck, Bas-Wohlert, Milles). Soon after, another linguist named Karl-Hampus Dahlstedt stated that using han in this way was “both impractical and sometimes inappropriate” (Milles, p. 22). This eventually led to a proposal in the 1970’s to avoid the usage of only the male pronoun in legal statutes, considering it was deemed problematic that the law only addressed half of the population, while it was of everyone’s concern (Milles, p. 22). After that, the topic covering the use of pronouns and hen was not heavily discussed for a long time. It only got mentioned again by the linguist Hans Karlgren, who suggested using hen in 1994,