A new gender-neutral pronoun is likely to enter the official Norwegian language within a year, the Language Council of Norway has confirmed.
“Hen” would become an alternative to the existing singular third-person pronouns, the feminine “hun” and the masculine “han”.
“Over time, we have seen that the actual use of hen has increased and stabilised,” Daniel Ims, a representative of the council, told Norwegian media.
Ims said that while gender-neutral pronouns had been discussed in Norway’s linguistic and grammar community for some time, the arguments for their use were not initially mirrored by Norwegian speech patterns.
Similar debates have been taking place around the world. Most recently, the French education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, accused a reference dictionary of “US-inspired wokeism” for including an entry for the word “iel”, used by some in France as a gender-neutral pronoun.
In the US, the Merriam-Webster dictionary included a singular gender-neutral definition of the pronoun “they” in 2019.
“They” first entered English language in its plural form via Old Norse. In turn, the English singular use of the pronoun has caught on with some non-binary Norwegians in recent years, with many using the Norwegian equivalent “de” in the same way.
“A hundred years ago it was normal to use singular de to address people of a higher rank,” said Carl-Oscar Vik, 18, from Skien in south-east Norway. Vik, who is non-binary, has been experimenting with pronouns over the past year. Although they do not mind using hen, they feel most at home with de, which they feel sounds more natural in Norwegian. “Ultimately it’s just a question of preference,” they said.
For Vik, the debate sparked by the plans to recognise hen has been a positive way to increase the visibility of non-binary people in public life. “I think that a normal person on the street doesn’t know anyone who identifies as non-binary,” they said. “But I hope that by getting hen into the dictionary we can get the idea out there, because there are many people who don’t feel at home in certain pronouns but don’t have the words to describe it.”
Vik also hopes that the official recognition of gender-neutral pronouns could be a first step to legal recognition of a third gender.
Hen could enter Norwegian dictionaries as early as spring or early autumn, Ims said, after a consultation phase open to “all in the [Norwegian] language community”.
