En and Ett
Learn how en and ett work in Swedish, what grammatical gender means, and how Swedish noun gender affects articles, adjectives, and other parts of the language.
The Swedish grammatical genders
Swedish nouns belong to one of two grammatical genders: en or ett.
These words function similarly to the English articles a or an, but they also affect other parts of Swedish grammar.
Unlike in many languages, grammatical gender in Swedish usually has nothing to do with biological gender. Most nouns are simply categorized as either en or ett.
en bil (a car)
ett hus (a house)
When learning a new Swedish noun, try to learn the article together with the word itself.
About 75% of Swedish nouns are en words, while the remaining nouns are usually ett words.
What do they do?
Grammatical genders help organize nouns into different categories within a language.
Many languages still connect grammatical gender partly to biological gender, something Swedish has lost almost completely.
Nevertheless, the gender affects how other words connect to the noun, such as adjectives and pronouns, as well as the indefinite and definite forms.
en stor bil (a big car)
ett stort hus (a big house)
This means that these words have to "agree" with the gender of the noun. Similar systems are found in French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and many other languages.
Where does it come from?
Old Norse originally had three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
Over time, the masculine and feminine genders merged together in most Swedish dialects. This created the modern common gender en.
It was not until fairly recently that Swedish grammarians fully moved away from these older categories. Traditionally, many grammars still divided en words into masculine, feminine, and a broader common category for nouns without clear biological gender called reale.
Nowadays, teachers go a bit easier on learners and just refer to nouns as en or ett words. The neuter gender never went through the same kind of merger.
This means that modern Swedish still carries traces of an older Scandinavian grammar system that was more similar to languages like German or Icelandic today.
Swedish never completely abandoned these older genders. In some dialects, certain nouns can still be referred to as han or hon. More broadly, both a human, människa, and a clock, klocka, can traditionally be referred to as a she. There is also the obsolete but sometimes used masculine -e ending for adjectives: Fredrik den store.