Good news for our nonbinary Norwegian friends: the arbiters of language are on your side.
On Monday, the Language Council of Norway announced its support for the gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun “hen,” complementing the masculine “han” and feminine “hun.” A spokesperson for the Council told Norwegian media that the word could enter dictionaries as early as spring or summer 2022, despite opposition from right-wing political parties.
“Over the years, we have seen that [“hen”] has become increasingly used,” Daniel Ims, the Language Council’s Section Chief, told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.
According to the Language Council’s website, “hen” first entered the Norwegian language via Finnish in 1966, and has been included in at least two academic dictionaries. But some debate has surrounded the word — not necessarily about its grammatical propriety, but regarding how it actually sounds when spoken aloud: “hen” can easily be mistaken in conversation for “han,” which would misgender the subject. (Still, it’s refreshing for this to be the concern, given how often we in the Anglophone world have been subjected to bad-faith arguments about “they” not being singular.)
For this reason, the Council’s recommendation applies mainly to those who wish to use “hen” as a personal pronoun, and they caution against using it as a general-purpose pronoun for those whose gender isn’t known to the speaker. In those cases, the Council says it may be more appropriate to use “de/dem,” formerly a formal third-person pronoun and now the Norwegian equivalent to a singular “they.”
“I hope that by getting ‘hen’ into the dictionary we can get the idea out there,” one nonbinary Norwegian, who uses “de,” told the Guardian, “because there are many people who don’t feel at home in certain pronouns but don’t have the words to describe it.”
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