Swedes, it appears, love to tinker with their language. A few decades ago, they decided that their formal pronoun Ni (the equivalent of Spanish usted, German singular Sie, and French singular vous) sounded too stuffy, so they abolished it. Just like that, the Swedes became knights who formerly said “Ni.”
Now reformers there are trying to introduce a gender-neutral pronoun to supplement the standard han (he) and hon (she). A couple of writers have produced a children’s book that uses it exclusively to refer to all the characters.
The pronoun is hen.
Hm… Why does that sound familiar? Have the Swedes been reading MuseBlog?
Wow, that is pretty cool. I’m just glad German grammar doesn’t change- the whole daß/das/dass thing was bad enough. Still, score one for the Kokonspiracy!
Very interesting…
That’s so cool on so many levels.
It’s really hard to speak (writing is easier) with gender-neutral pronouns in English without giving it a bit of thought, and it doesn’t help that we don’t actually have a singular, gender-neutral word that’s actually part of our language. There’s “ze” and “en” and “em”, but there’s not really a commonly accepted one. There’s “it” but that isn’t respectful when used towards people, and there’s “they”, but that’s awkward to use because it’s plural.
From a people’s rights standpoint, it’s wonderful. It was after I’d encountered (embarrassingly) how hard it is to talk about someone in a language that doesn’t have words for them, that I really started thinking about why agendered people aren’t taken seriously, or are considered (in my experience, at least) even more “out-there” than gays. If you think about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language shapes the way its speakers view the world, then no wonder we as a culture have so many hang-ups about accepting anything outside of the gender binary. Sad, but interesting.
ANYWAY.
This is cool.
Last summer I heard about a Swedish daycare group who use that exact gender-neutral pronoun and have for years, possibly since it was started. All the kids refer to themselves and each other using it.
This is awesome. Equality through linguistics!
Doubleplusgood Newspeak, eh?
This makes me proud of my Swedish heritage. This will also make it easier to refer to someone whose gender is unknown because you’ve never met said person.