Grammatical genders in Norwegian: If in doubt, use "en"!

In Norwegian, like most European languages, every noun has a grammatical gender: masculine, feminine or neuter. You have probably already seen the articles en, ei and et, for example:

• En stein (masculine) – A stone
• Ei bok (feminine) – A book
• Et tre (neuter) – A tree

In English, nouns do not have grammatical genders, and consequently, there is only one indefinite article "a", whereas Norwegian has three: en, ei, et, one for each gender. Grammatical gender influences many other grammatical features as well. For instance, the definitive form of a word in English only has one form: "the": The stone, the book, the tree. Norwegian has three, one for each gender:

• Steinen (masculine)
• Boka (feminine)
• Treet (neuter)

When you learn Norwegian nouns, you should always learn its grammatical gender as well. Unfortunately, there is no easy rule to grammatical genders in Norwegian, unlike many Romance and Slavic languages. In Spanish, nouns ending in -o (gato – cat) are most often masculine, whereas nouns ending in -a (mesa – table) are most often feminine. There is no such rule in Norwegian; you simply have to painstakingly learn the grammatical gender for each individual noun.

Grammatical gender must not be confused with the normal use of the word "gender". There is nothing intrinsically "masculine" about masculine nouns. It is simply a way to classify nouns. However, some nouns like "woman", "man", "boy" and "girl" take the same grammatical gender as the associated gender:

• Ei dame/kvinne (feminine) – A woman
• En mann (masculine) – A man
• Ei jente (feminine) – A girl
• En gutt (masculine) – A boy

Only Two Grammatical Genders?

I previously said that "a book", ei bok, is feminine. But you might have seen the same word used as a masculine noun: en bok. The same is true for jente (girl) and kvinne (woman). What is happening here?

In Norwegian Bokmål, the feminine form is optional, which means that grammatical feminine nouns can be treated as grammatical masculine nouns, a so-called common grammatical gender. For instance, both these form of "a girl" and "the girl" are perfectly acceptable in Norwegian:

• Ei jente, *jenta* (feminine) AND
• En jente, *jenten* (masculine)

Which one does Norwegians use? In written language, many actually prefer the common grammatical gender, i.e., the masculine form of feminine nouns as it is perceived as more formal. However, in most dialects of Norwegian, the feminine grammatical form is retained (ei jente and jenta). The Oslo-region and Bergen are exceptions to these; they generally prefer to treat all feminine nouns in the common (masculine) gender (en jente and jenten).

In the future, Bokmål might move towards only two genders: neuter and common (masculine). This has in fact already happened to the other Scandinavian languages Swedish and Danish. Both Swedish and Danish used to have three genders, just like Norwegian, but the feminine form gradually disappeared. Today, Swedish and Danish only use two grammatical genders: neuter and common.

So, if you are in doubt which gender a noun takes in Norwegian, use "en"!

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A guest blogpost by Marius Stangeland. The author of the Norwegian Podcasts "Norsk for Beginners" and "Lær Norsk Nå".