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West of the red line the definite article goes before the word as in English or German; east of the line it takes the form of a suffix. In standard Danish and Swedish, nouns have two grammatical genders, and pronouns have the same two grammatical genders in addition to two natural genders similar to English.
Nouns have one of two grammatical genders: common (utrum) and neuter (neutrum), which determine their definite forms as well as the form of any adjectives and articles used to describe them. Noun gender is largely arbitrary and must be memorized; however, around three quarters of all Swedish nouns are common gender.
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.)
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 ...
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 ...
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:
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