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There is a small number of Swedish nouns that can be either common or neuter gender. The database for Svenska Akademiens ordlista 12 contained 324 such nouns. [1] There are traces of the former four-case system for nouns evidenced in that pronouns still have subject, object (based on the old accusative and dative form) and genitive forms. [2]
Swedish also has deviations from a complete common gender. Danish has no such vestiges since unlike Dutch and German, it does not use the same pronouns for objects and people, but like English, it has natural gender personal pronouns for people and separate grammatical gender pronouns for objects and animals.
Although gender inflection may be used to construct nouns and names for people of different sexes in languages that have grammatical gender, this alone does not constitute grammatical gender. Distinct words and names for men and women are also common in languages which do not have a grammatical gender system for nouns in general.
English does have some words that are associated with gender, but it does not have a true grammatical gender system. "English used to have grammatical gender. We started losing it as a language ...
In these languages, animate nouns are predominantly of common gender, while inanimate nouns may be of either gender. Danish (Danish has four gendered pronouns, but only two grammatical genders in the sense of noun classes. See Gender in Danish and Swedish.)
The system contracted so that words of masculine and feminine gender folded into a common gender while the neuter gender remained. In Swedish and Danish, there are two words that would translate to the English pronoun "it": den for common gender words and det for neuter gender words. Both are gender-neutral in the sense of not referring to male ...
Swedish nouns and adjectives are declined in genders as well as number. Nouns are of common gender (en form) or neuter gender (ett form). [57] The gender determines the declension of the adjectives. For example, the word fisk ("fish") is a noun of common gender (en fisk) and can have the following forms:
Like other languages with noun classes, Swedish has few consistent rules to determine each word's gender; so the genders have to be learned word by word, although the words of common gender far outnumber the neuter words, and given morphological derivations consistently yield results of a certain gender, e.g. adding -ning to a verb always ...