in the previous post in this series<\/a>, this is true for gender too: the pronouns that we use for people typically have more to do with respect than with grammar.<\/p>\nMy violin teacher appreciated being called \u201cvous\u201d, but attitudes about the use of formal and informal pronouns vary from person to person and have shifted over time, as many French speakers can describe at length. This too, happens for gender. When we as a society start to think differently about gender, the way we use gendered language shifts too.<\/p>\n
Swedish provides a great example of this with the pronoun hen<\/em>.<\/p>\nThis hen is gender inclusive<\/h4>\n
In the 1960s and 1970s, linguists and legal scholars in Sweden proposed the use of a new pronoun hen<\/em> as a gender-neutral pronoun to be used when someone\u2019s gender is either unknown or unimportant. They argued that this new pronoun would be shorter than a phrase like han eller hon<\/em> (\u2018he or she\u2019) and more inclusive than using han<\/em> (\u2018he\u2019) as a default pronoun (Milles 2011).<\/p>\nThroughout the 90s, hen<\/em> gained traction in feminist, queer, and transgender spaces, and its use expanded. In these spaces, people used hen<\/em> not only as a gender-neutral replacement for han eller hon<\/em>, but also to refer to specific people with fluid gender identities or identities outside the dichotomy of male and female (Milles 2011).<\/p>\nBreaking into the 21st century, hen<\/em> was increasingly adopted by publications and institutions as a gender-neutral pronoun. Eventually, it was in wide enough use that the Swedish Language Council endorsed it in 2013, and it was added to the Dictionary of the Swedish Academy (SAOL) in 2015 (Gustafsson et al. 2015). Although it still felt new to some speakers, hen<\/em> was clearly here to stay.<\/p>\nSmall changes can have big effects<\/h4>\n
It\u2019s been over a decade now since hen<\/em> became official, and as you might expect, it\u2019s become as standard as any other part of the language (Gustafsson et al. 2015, Vergoossen 2015, Gustafsson et al. 2021, Vergoossen 2021). But that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s had no effect.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/Picture1-300x238.png\")
<\/p>\n
The effects of a language change like this can be surprising. In one study, researchers Margit Tavits and Efr\u00e9n Perez asked Swedish speakers to describe pictures including an ungendered figure, like the one above. Then they asked them to imagine meeting a new person who\u2019s running for political office. What would that person\u2019s name be, and what would they be like? The researchers found that when participants used hen<\/em> to talk about the ungendered person in the picture, they were more likely to give a non-masculine name for the new person they imagined than the participants that used han<\/em> (\u2018he\u2019) were.<\/p>\nLater, when the researchers asked participants to name politicians that they knew, participants who used hen<\/em> were more likely to name woman politicians, and in another follow-up survey they were also more likely to express positive opinions about the presence of women and LGBTQ people in public life (Tavits and Perez 2019).<\/p>\nIn this way, hen<\/em> opened up a space for Swedish speakers to think more readily about people with a wider variety of genders, and consequently, to be more accepting of a wider variety of gender expressions in society. What a positive impact for such a tiny word!<\/p>\nBut what about other languages? Is Swedish just an exception? And what does your brain do with neopronouns? To find out, check out Pronouns in Bio, Pt. 3: What the brain can teach us about pronouns<\/a>.<\/p>\nBibliography<\/h4>\n\n- Allison, M. C. (2018). G \u201chen\u201d der Neutral\u2013How Sweden is Furthering Gender Equality Through Language. In Rhetorics Change\/Rhetoric\u2019s Change. Parlor Press.<\/li>\n
- Audring, J. (2009). Reinventing pronoun gender.<\/li>\n
- De Vos, L., De Sutter, G., & De Vogelaer, G. (2021). Weighing psycholinguistic and social factors for semantic agreement in Dutch pronouns. Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 33(1), 30-66.<\/li>\n
- Gustafsson Send\u00e9n, M., B\u00e4ck, E. A., & Lindqvist, A. (2015). Introducing a gender-neutral pronoun in a natural gender language: the influence of time on attitudes and behavior. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 893.<\/li>\n
- Gustafsson Send\u00e9n, M., Renstr\u00f6m, E., & Lindqvist, A. (2021). Pronouns beyond the binary: The change of attitudes and use over time. Gender & Society, 35(4), 588-615.<\/li>\n
- Milles, K. (2011). Feminist language planning in Sweden. Current issues in language planning, 12(1), 21-33.<\/li>\n
- Tavits, M., & P\u00e9rez, E. O. (2019). Language influences mass opinion toward gender and LGBT equality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(34), 16781-16786.<\/li>\n
- Vergoossen, H. (2015). Cognitive demands of gender-neutral language: the new genderless pronoun in the Swedish language and its effect on reading speed and memory.<\/li>\n
- Vergoossen, H. P. (2021). Breaking the Binary: Attitudes towards and cognitive effects of gender-neutral pronouns (Doctoral dissertation, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These days new pronouns are gaining recognition in many languages. Some are old pronouns being used in new ways, like \u201cthey\u201d in English or \u201cdie\u201d in Dutch. Others are totally new, like \u201ciel\u201d in French. But how do new pronouns \u201chappen\u201d and what are their effects? To answer these questions, we turn to Swedish, a language that gained an official new pronoun over a decade ago. Let\u2019s unpack what Swedes were thinking when they added the little word \u201chen\u201d to their vocabulary and see where they\u2019re at now. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":2454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editors-picks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2450"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2624,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450\/revisions\/2624"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mpi-talkling.mpi.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}