{"id":3898,"date":"2012-04-13T06:36:19","date_gmt":"2012-04-13T11:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3898"},"modified":"2012-04-13T06:37:43","modified_gmt":"2012-04-13T11:37:43","slug":"swedens-gender-neutral-3rd-person-singular-pronoun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3898","title":{"rendered":"Sweden's gender-neutral 3rd-person singular pronoun"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Slate<\/i> has an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/double_x\/doublex\/2012\/04\/hen_sweden_s_new_gender_neutral_pronoun_causes_controversy_.html\">article lambasting Sweden's growing enthusiasm for total gender neutrality<\/a>, and it raises the profile of a move, actually originating in the mid 1960s, to get <i>hen<\/i> established as a new pronoun meaning \"he\/she\/it\", eliminating the forced choice between <i>han<\/i> \"he\" and <i>hon<\/i> \"she\". <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I don't know which I would say is likely to be more difficult: eliminating gender stereotypes and inequalities from society or getting a neologism established by fiat in the set of pronouns in a language.  And I don't know Sweden (never been there) and I don't know Swedish (never studied it).  So I have very little to say, except that our pronoun <i>they<\/i> was originally borrowed into English from the Scandinavian language family (the Danish spoken by the invaders of northern England about a thousand years ago) and since then has been doing useful service in English as the morphosyntactically plural but singular-antecedent-permitting gender-neutral pronoun known to linguists as <A href=\"https:\/\/www.google.co.uk\/#hl=en&#038;sugexp=egsbsh&#038;gs_nf=1&#038;cp=30&#038;gs_id=up&#038;xhr=t&#038;q=%22singular+they%22+%22Language+Log%22&#038;pf=p&#038;sclient=psy-ab&#038;oq=%22singular+they%22+%22Language+Log%22&#038;aq=f&#038;aqi=&#038;aql=&#038;gs_l=&#038;pbx=1&#038;bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&#038;fp=c547622d5da8e497&#038;biw=1176&#038;bih=834\">singular <i>they<\/i><\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>Apart from that, I don't have anything interesting to say on this potentially very interesting linguistic topic in the news.  The obvious thing to do, for anyone who was not a hidebound opponent of the vox populi and all-round blue meanie, would be to open the comments column on the subject so we could hear from some Swedish-competent or Swedish-resident readers, wouldn't it? All it would take is one click on this check-box down here&#8230;  Oops! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Slate has an article lambasting Sweden's growing enthusiasm for total gender neutrality, and it raises the profile of a move, actually originating in the mid 1960s, to get hen established as a new pronoun meaning \"he\/she\/it\", eliminating the forced choice between han \"he\" and hon \"she\".<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,75,63,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-gender","category-language-change","category-linguistics-in-the-news","category-singular-they"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3898\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}