Swedish Grammar - Nouns

Nouns

Nouns have two grammatical genders: common (utrum) and neuter (neutrum), which determine their definite forms as well as the form of any adjectives 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 en katt, en häst, en fluga, etc.

Swedish once had three genders—masculine, feminine and neuter. Though traces of the three-gender system still exist in archaic expressions and certain dialects, masculine and feminine nouns have today merged into the common gender. A remnant of the masculine gender can still be expressed in the singular definite form of adjectives according to natural gender (male humans), in the same way as personal pronouns, han/hon, are chosen for representing nouns in Contemporary Swedish (male/female humans and optionally animals).

There are a small number of Swedish nouns that can be either common or neuter gender. The database for Svenska Akademiens Ordlista 12 contained 324 such nouns.

There are traces of the former four-case system for nouns evidenced in that pronouns still have a subject, object (based on the old accusative and dative form) and genitive forms. Nouns make no distinction between subject and object forms, and the genitive is formed by adding -s to the end of a word. This -s genitive functions more like a clitic than a proper case and is nearly identical to the possessive suffix used in English. Note, however, that in Swedish this genitive s is appended directly to the word and must not be preceded by an apostrophe.

Swedish nouns are inflected for number and definiteness and can take a genitive suffix. They exhibit the following morpheme order: