you’re right that lots of other languages have gendered nouns. however, swedish nouns are not gendered in the “traditional” sense. i.e., it is not the case that some nouns are “masculine” and others are “feminine”.
i think the wikipedia page does a good job of explaining it:
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. Living beings are often common nouns, like in enkatt “a cat”, enhäst “a horse”, en*fluga* “a fly”, etc.
edit: i wanted to clarify that this isn’t some major gripe i have with the language. i think all spoken languages are bound to have their own quirks and that’s okay, it can just make certain things a bit tricky when learning the language. as a whole, i think swedish is a very nice language
Swedish used to have masculine and feminine gendered nouns historically - and some dialects still do - but they were simplified into two grammatical genders, utrum and neutrum, just as your link says. (There are remnants though, for example “vad är klockan?” “hon är halv fyra”). Masculine and feminine were just squashed into the “utrum” gender, basically, and neutrum is neuter.
thank you for the explanation. that helps to clear things up a bit and it’s also nice to have some context for why things are the way they are in the language. i had always been told that the “ett/en” thing was just an arbitrary quirk of the language, so it’s nice to get a more concrete explanation of it.
the example you gave was also super helpful. i found it confusing that sometimes “hon” meant “it”. i had always been told (in casual conversations) that swedish wasn’t a gendered language, so that whole thing was quite confusing until now.
you’re right that lots of other languages have gendered nouns. however, swedish nouns are not gendered in the “traditional” sense. i.e., it is not the case that some nouns are “masculine” and others are “feminine”.
i think the wikipedia page does a good job of explaining it:
edit: i wanted to clarify that this isn’t some major gripe i have with the language. i think all spoken languages are bound to have their own quirks and that’s okay, it can just make certain things a bit tricky when learning the language. as a whole, i think swedish is a very nice language
Swedish used to have masculine and feminine gendered nouns historically - and some dialects still do - but they were simplified into two grammatical genders, utrum and neutrum, just as your link says. (There are remnants though, for example “vad är klockan?” “hon är halv fyra”). Masculine and feminine were just squashed into the “utrum” gender, basically, and neutrum is neuter.
thank you for the explanation. that helps to clear things up a bit and it’s also nice to have some context for why things are the way they are in the language. i had always been told that the “ett/en” thing was just an arbitrary quirk of the language, so it’s nice to get a more concrete explanation of it.
the example you gave was also super helpful. i found it confusing that sometimes “hon” meant “it”. i had always been told (in casual conversations) that swedish wasn’t a gendered language, so that whole thing was quite confusing until now.