this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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this is incorrect. we recently added a neuter singular pronoun. "hen" was introduced in 2009, and not widely used until like 2019. Also, in technical documentation, masculine pronouns were taught as the default to use (both in swedish and in english) when i was in university in the early 10s. this has changed now, but it definitely wasn't on the table when kling was in school.
Interesting, thanks for the correction! I thought it was a medieval form that stuck around.
Masculine being the default was the case for English (and French) too, but not anymore, and certainly not by implying anything other than the masculine is "political".
yeah smaller languages have taken longer to adapt to that change, because it started in the anglophone world and the concepts of gendered language don't translate well. it's like how the word "man" in english used to mean "human" and not be gendered at all, and when language is updated to remove the -- now gendered -- word and then translated, the translation stops making any sense because the context of a word is so different.
i always give massive leeway when language is involved, because the culture around progressive language is basically 99% centred on the US.
Not really. Mandarin for example has different characters for "he" and "she", but they are homophones ("ta", or "tamen" plural) so you can't tell who's who in spoken language. Hungarian doesn't use gendered pronouns and Finnish doesn't either (actually, now that I think of it, that may be where you borrowed yours - isn't it "hen" too?)
i'm not really talking about the grammar, but about the cultural meanings of the words. there may be implied gender in a mode of speaking even in a language without gendered pronouns. my grandmother would always assume people i was talking about were male if i didn't use a gendered pronoun (like i would be talking about a colleague by referring to them as "my colleague") because that's the "cultural default" here still. it has changed a lot in the past five-ten years but it's still the default.
and i actually don't know where we got "hen" from. i do know that it was not originally meant to be an actual gender-neutral pronoun, but as a placeholder where gender is unknown or unimportant. it was created to replace the more cumbersome "han/hon" in legal texts, and not meant to be used to refer to specific people. but we do that anyway because it helps adoption.
looking it up it does seem to be taken from finnish! their word is "hän", which would be pronounced about the same. i learned something.