Hen – the debated Swedish pronoun
A note on Swedish hen You may have heard of the gender neutral Swedish pronoun “hen“. Sweden have been debating this during the past decade. Some people feel strongly about it. So what’s the fuss all about? Swedish gender and pronouns The Swedish language, like German, used to have three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine and […]
The Swedish sin
The Swedish sin: reflexive possessive pronouns Have you come across the words sin, sitt and sina in Swedish and feel confused about them? Let’s talk about the Swedish sin! I’m joking a bit when I call it The Swedish Sin. This phrase is an internationally known phenomenon that has influenced foreigners’ views on Swedish women […]
Verb comes second – Swedish word order
One of the major issues for learners, especially for English speakers, is Swedish word order in sentences. People nearly fluent still sometimes make word order mistakes in Swedish, and for beginners this is really difficult to get your head around. These kinds of mistakes sound pretty ugly to Swedes: no native Swede would do this, […]