En and Ett
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 (utrum), while the remaining nouns are usually ett words. (Svenska Akademiens grammatik, based on a count of newspaper prose.)
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.
Definite forms
The difference between en words and ett words also shows up in the definite form.
In English, you usually add the before a noun. In Swedish, the definite form is usually made with an ending instead.
en words usually take -(e)n:
en bil → bilen
en hund → hunden
ett words usually take -(e)t:
ett hus → huset
ett äpple → äpplet
So the gender of the noun affects more than the indefinite article.
When you learn a noun, learn the indefinite and definite form together: en bil, bilen; ett hus, huset.
Den and det
The gender of a noun also affects which pronoun you use when referring back to it.
For en words, Swedish uses den:
Bilen där borta. Den är ny.The car over there. It is new.
Hunden är hungrig. Den vill äta.The dog is hungry. It wants to eat.
For ett words, Swedish uses det:
Huset där borta. Det är gammalt.The house over there. It is old.
Äpplet är rött. Det är moget.The apple is red. It is ripe.
The phenomenon to point back to something with it also exists in English but without any gender distinction.
Useful endings
The gender of a Swedish noun is mostly something you learn with the word itself. But some endings can give you a useful hint.
Endings that produce en words
-ing: en tidning, en övning
-het: en nyhet, en möjlighet
-else: en händelse, en berättelse
Endings that produce ett words
-eri: ett bageri, ett bryggeri
-um: ett museum, ett centrum
-ande: ett tänkande, ett mottagande
Be careful with -ande since it often is an en word when referring to a person:
en ordförande
en resande
However, when it refers to an activity or process, it is usually an ett word:
ett åkande
ett pratande
Endings can help, but the safest thing is still to learn nouns together with en or ett.