One in five Swedes dislike the gender-neutral pronoun hen
In the study, carried out by Novus on behalf of language magazine Språktidningen, 22 percent of Swedes said that the pronoun hen was the most irritating aspect of the Swedish language.
The first reported use of the gender-neutral pronoun, to be used instead of han (he) or hon (she), was in the 1950s, when it was used by language professor Karl-Hampus Dahlstedt, but it didn’t appear in writing until linguist Rolf Dunås wrote a newspaper article in 1966 proposing the introduction of the new pronoun.
After that, use of the pronoun was mostly limited to those within the LGBT community until 2012, when a children’s book sparked debate and media attention thanks to the exclusive use of hen to refer to its characters.
In 2015, hen entered the Swedish dictionary, a move which made it more difficult for critics to argue that it wasn’t an established or accepted alternative to han or hon.
As Språktidningen’s editor-in-chief Anders Svensson points out in this article, the pronoun hen has had an ideological and political dimension since debate took off in 2012, and this is still clearly visible today.
Although 22 percent of the survey’s respondents listed hen as the most irritating aspect of the Swedish language, this number rose to a whopping 50 percent amongst respondents who identified with the Sweden Democrats.
On the other side of the political spectrum, those sympathising with the Left Party, the Greens, the Liberals or the Centre Party were least likely to find hen irritating, with a mere 5 to 7 percent of these groups putting it in first place.
Torbjörn Sjöström, CEO of polling company Novus, told Språktidningen that these results didn’t surprise him.
“The fact that hen is irritating for Sweden Democrat sympathisers more than others is not surprising. People join that party because they want things to be like they were in the past. A new word which is gender-neutral symbolises a lot of the developments these people are against,” he explained.
One in five against särskrivning
The same amount, 22 percent, stated that särskrivningar – writing compound words incorrectly as two separate words – annoyed them the most.
This may sound like a minor error, but särskrivningar (literally: “separate writing”) can lead to major misunderstandings. Just look at these amusing examples of särskrivning gone wrong:
En rödhårig kvinna: “a red-haired woman”
En röd hårig kvinna: a red, hairy woman
Kassapersonalen: “checkout workers”
Kassa personalen: “useless employees”
Barnunderkläder: “children’s underwear”
Barn under kläder: “child under clothes”
In contrast to debates over the use of the word hen, debates over särskrivning have raged since the 1800s, where they were often considered to be major mistakes if featured in a text. One reason for this, Svensson notes, is that order in itself was seen as beautiful at this time.
Maria Bylin, language advisor at the Swedish Language Council (Språkrådet), told Språktidningen that she recognises this argument in modern debate on särskrivningar.
“You associate developments in the language with the country and with society,” she explained. “So whatever changes you can see in the language, you think it will happen in society, too.”
One popular scapegoat for this increase in särskrivning is the influence of English on the Swedish language. In English, we have fewer compound words than in Swedish, although they do still exist: a few examples are postbox, doorknob and blackberry. It is, however, harder to form compounds than in Swedish.
To return to the examples above, it would look strange to write “redhairedgirl”, “checkoutworker” or “childrensunderwear” as compounds in English.
So, is the rise of English to blame for mistakes in Swedish? Not according to linguist Katharina Hallencreutz, who noted when studying high school students’ English essays that they had no issues writing English compound loan words such as makeup or popcorn.
This also wouldn’t explain the large amount of särskrivningar seen in historical texts in Sweden: they feature heavily in laws dating back to the 1200s, as well as Gustav Vasa’s Swedish bible translation, which was published in 1541.
One surprising result of the survey was the fact that young people were more likely than older people to find särskrivningar irritating:
“That surprised me a bit,” Svensson told public broadcaster SVT. “Often you hear the argument that older people think young people write carelessly and särskriver too much.”
Svensson wasn’t sure why this was, but did have a theory: “I suppose those who have recently finished school – most of them have learnt when words should be written as one word, and when they should be separate,” he told SVT.
English loanwords
The influence of English on the Swedish language was a major bugbear for a number of respondents, though. As many as 15 percent of those in Novus’ survey answered that “unnecessary English loanwords” were the most irritating thing about modern Swedish.
English loanwords were most irritating amongst Swedes over 65, where 29 percent stated they were the number one source of irritation, a number which was much lower in other age groups.
Lena Lind Palicki, a Swedish lecturer at Stockholm University, said that this could be to do with comprehensibility. She noted that irritation over English loanwords was especially high amongst older respondents who had left school at 16.
“We can assume that these people have a lower level of English, and then it’s a democratic problem, if English loanwords are used which can be difficult for many people to understand,” she told Språktidningen.
Palicki can’t imagine that English will remain as large a source of annoyance in the future as it is now, though.
“The irritation over English loanwords may have gone out of date in twenty years. Today’s youth will not start to be irritated by the same things as today’s elderly, but they’ll probably start making a symbolic issue of things they struggle with in school today,” she told the magazine.
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My Swedish isn’t good enough to know for sure, but I wonder: is the hyphen used at all in Swedish to avoid the confusion caused by separating compound words? In English, the rules are not hard and fast on the use of hyphens. But traditionally, where splitting the adjectives would modify the intended meaning (eg: red-haired girl vs. red, hairy girl), the hyphen comes in handy. Historically in English, adjectives frequently used together tend to become hyphenated and then compounded. “Baseball” was, once upon a time, “base ball”, and one assumes it went through a “base-ball” phase in getting there. My source for this is Merriam-Webster’s dictionary on the use of hyphens.
Interesting thoughts, Nesika. I’m not sure where the splitting of Swedish compound words has come from in view of that there’s a strong natural tendency to compound as much as possible in Swedish, and that hyphening instead of two separate words would not come naturally to the average Swede. My basic approach with Swedish is to compound if in doubt, and if the text you’re writing is important, to test it with Google or the Word spellchecker to see if your ‘new’ compound is generally acceptable (although I find that Word is not always reliable with this test.) At the same time, I find that certain compounds lead to confusion like, as a small example, Kungsängen. There are many places in Sweden called Kungsängen (King’s Meadow) while the bedroom furnisher KungSängen have realised that they have to capitalise the S in their trademark logo to avoid confusion, and often I have to think twice when I see it. Another interesting aspect of compounds is that Swedish does not accept three of the same letter in a row, which produces words for example like nattåg (night train) where the third t is dropped.
In English, there is a relatively new trend to hyphen the adverbial -ly with the following adjective. This was a strict no-no up to about ten (?) years ago, but now seems to have become generally accepted.