Swedish/Nouns
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection
Like English nouns, the Swedish nouns are declined according to number: they're either singular or plural. Unlike English, however, Swedish nouns are also declined according to article ("the car" versus "a car"). Instead of a definite article - "the" in the case of English - Swedish uses suffixes. We will see how this works later on.
Contents |
[edit] Gender
The North Germanic languages, to which Swedish belongs, originally had three genders: masculine (maskulinum), feminine (femininum) and neuter (neutrum). However, as the language evolved, the first two were merged into a "real gender" (realgenus) or common (utrum). In practice, this means Swedish has what we might call two flavours of "it", which can complicate matters.
[edit] Common
- en stol - a chair
- stolen - the chair
- en ny stol - a new chair
- den nya stolen - the new chair
- stolar - chairs
- stolarna - the chairs
- nya stolar - new chairs
- de nya stolarna - the new chairs
[edit] Neuter
- ett bord - a table
- bordet - the table
- ett nytt bord - a new table
- det nya bordet - the new table
- två bord - two tables
- borden - the tables
- nya bord - new tables
- de nya borden - the new tables
The gender of a noun does not only affect the noun itself but also adjectives describing the noun, definite articles and singular indefinite articles.
Now, what you should be asking yourself is this: "How can I know if a particular noun is common or neuter?"
You can't. There is no general rationale as to what gender the different nouns take, although with enough experience you can sometimes make an educated guess as some generalizations can be made. When talking about things that are clearly masculine or feminine, such as "woman" or "boy", these are treated as common, for instance. Gender doesn't play a very important role in the Swedish language, and thus you will still be understood if you get it wrong. Most words are common so if you do not know the gender of a word, you can assume this to be the case. Be aware, however, that if you want to pass for a native Swede, a slip-up like this WILL give you away... If you decided to buy a Swedish/English English/Swedish dictionary, it is advisable to check to see if the listings for words include the article en or ett in front of the listed words.
[edit] Definiteness
A definite noun in English takes the definite article the, and an indefinite noun takes the indefinite articles a or an. As far as indefinite nouns are concerned, things are very similar in Swedish.
The indefinite articles are en and ett. A neuter noun takes ett and a common noun takes en.
- ett bord - a table
- en stol - a chair
The definite articles in Swedish are attached to the end of the noun as a suffix. The neuter suffix is -et and the common suffix is -en.
- bordet - the table
- stolen - the chair
In addition to these two suffixes, Swedish also has two further definite articles which are much more similar to English the. The articles are used when you want to use an adjective (a word which describes a noun like green, big, old, etc) with the definite noun. The common article is den and the neuter is det.
- det nya bordet - the new table
- den nya stolen - the new chair
Notice that the nouns still have the definite suffix attached. Adjectives decline for number and gender, but that will be looked at in greater detail elsewhere.
[edit] Number
Swedish boasts no less than five different pluralization suffixes, and it's often hard to know which one to use together with a certain noun. The -s plural suffix is never used in Swedish.
Though it is important to remember that there are always exceptions, for example "äpple" (apple) in plural is "äpplen" and does not fit into any generalized category, but is rather irregularly inflected, and there are words with complete irregularity, like "gås" (goose) and "gäss" (geese).
[edit] -er
- bild > bilder (picture > pictures)
[edit] -ar
- båt > båtar (boat > boats)
- stol > stolar (chair > chairs)
[edit] -or
- flicka > flickor (girl > girls)
[edit] -r
- sko > skor (shoe > shoes)
[edit] -0 (no suffix)
- hus > hus (house > houses)
[edit] The plural definite
In Swedish the plural definite articles are -en and -na.
- borden - the tables
- stolarna - the chairs
- husen - the houses
As you can see, -en was also used as one of the definite articles. This can produce confusion as a person might want to say the table and think that he should use the -en as definite article: borden. That would however lead to saying the tables.
