Introduction to Nouns from Duolingo

Two genders – but four pronouns! (from Duolingo)

That seems a bit overkill - but it is actually quite logical (we Swedes like logic).

First of all you might wonder what a gender is. Well, there are two kinds of gender – natural (male and female) and grammatical gender.

English only uses natural gender ("he" for males, "she" for females and "it" for objects) whereas Romance languages such as French use natural genders ("he" and "she") as grammatical gender as well (everything is thus either a "he" or a "she" in French).

Swedish has a double system. When talking about people, we use the natural gender (he and she) but when we aren't talking about humans, you have to look at the grammatical gender. Swedish words belong either to the en-words (also called n-words, common gender or utrum) or to the ett-words (also called t-words, neuter or neutrum).

The names en-words and ett-words are derived from the indefinite article (singular) of each group, both corresponding to a(n) in English.

Examples

Female	Male	En-words	Ett-words
hon she	han he	den it	det it

Välkommen!

Means "welcome" but we don't use it in the expression you're welcome. That would be  varsågod.

”I speak -ska”

Nope, Swedes don’t have a particular thing for ska music but most names of languages are derived from the name of the country, the adjective or the nationality with the ending –ska added to it.

Examples

Country	Adjective	Nationality	Language
Sverige Sweden	svensk(t)  swedish	en svensk   a Swede	Svenska  Swedish language)
England England	engelsk(t) English	en engelsman  an Englishman	engelska  English (language)

Oh, and as you have probably already noticed, we do not capitalize adjectives, nationalities or languages (only countries). Unless they happen to come first in the sentence, of course.

Tips and notes

”A GLASS AND GLASS-THE”

Swedish uses two separate indefinite articles, both equivalent to the English a(n), en andett. The former is used with en-words and the latter with ett-words, hence the names of the two groups.

When it comes to the definite form, it gets weird.

Swedish does not use a separate article like English the, instead, we add an ending to the word in question. Guess which one!

en-words take -en and ett-words take -et.

However, we do not like to have two vowels next to each other (we just think it sounds wrong). So should the word end in a vowel, we just add the corresponding consonant.

SOMETIMES WE DROP THE LAST -E- OR -A- IN THE WORD (E.G. “EN GAFFEL” – “GAFFELN”) BUT YOU DON'T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT THAT QUITE YET!

Examples

Indefinite singular	Definite singular
en sked a spoon	skeden the spoon
ett glas a glass	glaset the glass

Fågeln och spindeln

Hmm... did you spot the definite article at the end? Looks a bit strange, doesn't it? One would have expected "fågelen" and "spindelen". Well, to be honest, you can - in some Swedish regions (in the South for instance).

The en-word endings –el, –en, –er and –ar are very hungry endings so they eat up the following -e-, leaving us with only a consonant.

Examples

Indefinite	Definite
en fågel a bird	fågeln the bird
en spindel a spider	spindeln the spider

A Møøse once bit my sister...

The national animal of Sweden is The King of the Forest, Alces alces, in American English known as the moose. In British English, this animal is called as an elk. Just to make things more complicated, there's an American animal called elk which is not at all the same animal as the moose or what the Brits call an elk, this is Cervus canadensis, also known as a wapiti (in Swedish: en wapitihjort, but we don't have them here). 
Complications don't stop there. The normal plural of both moose and elk is the same as the singular, so that it's one moose, several moose and one elk, several elk. The Swedish word behaves perfectly normal though: en älg, älgen in the singular, and in the plural:älgar, älgarna. 
There are lots of moose in Sweden. The yearly hunt is a big deal, notably the king likes to shoot the big animal. Moose can be a big traffic problem. There are road signs with moose on them to warn for them, these have become a sort of tourist symbol for Sweden, and especially German tourists have been known to steal those signs as souvenirs. Young moose are not shy and often like to enter people's gardens to eat apples. 
There's also usually at least one kid in every school who looks a lot like a moose and is nicknamed The moose. :P

Indefinite and definite singular

All Swedish words are divided into two groups: en-words (or utrum) and ett-words (orneutrum). Unfortunately, you cannot know to which group a certain word belongs but there are some tips to have a greater chance of guessing right.

·         Most words are en-words

·         Most words design

·         nating a person are en-words ¹

·         Have a look at the ending, many endings take the same article (e.g. –a² , –ing and–het are always en-words)

¹ One common exception is ett barn a child
² The only exceptions are ett öga, ett öra and ett hjärta. 

Forms

The indefinite singular always takes an article. en-words take en and ett-words take ett

To form the definite form you simply add -en to the en-words and -et to the ett-words.

Examples

Indefinite	Definite
en bok a book	boken the book

Liebe Deutschsprachige & Lieve Nederlandstalige A special warning to you: in the vast majority of the cases, the ending -en is not a plural ending, as is German and Dutch! "Studenten" means the student. The plural of "student" is in fact "studenter).

Special cases

Swedish does not like to have two vowels next to each other, so if a word ends in a vowel, we drop the -e- in the ending.

Examples

Indefinite	Definite
en soppa a soup	soppan the soup
ett kaffe a coffee	kaffet the coffee

Sometimes, we do keep the -e- in the ending, but we drop the -e- in the preceding syllable instead. This happens to ett-words ending in –el, –en, and –er.

Examples

Indefinite	Definite
ett vatten a water	vattnet the water
socker a sugar	sockret the sugar

But why, oh, why do you do this to me?
Because “vattenet”, “sockeret” would be too blurry and sound way too Danish!

Plurals

Swedish plurals have a reputation for being irregular and hard to learn. This is, in fact,not true. While there are certainly many irregular plural forms in Swedish, there is also a lot of predictability, and a large amount of words are entirely predictable if you know the rules!

Below are the 5 normal Swedish plural forms - both indefinite and definite.

Singular	Plural indefinite	Plural definite
en kvinna	kvinnor	kvinnorna
en hund	hundar	hundarna
en sak	saker	sakerna
ett hus	hus	husen
ett yrke	yrken	yrkena

How to predict the plural

En-words

·         -a → -or
en kvinna → kvinnor
en gata → gator

·         -e → -ar
en pojke → pojkar

·         Words in -are have no special plural form.
en läkare → läkare

·         -ing → -ingar
en tidning → tidningar

·         Words with stress on the final syllable always take -er.
en elefant → elefanter
en station → stationer
en idé → idéer

·         Words ending in -el, --er and -en usually take -ar, losing their e in the process.
en fågel → fåglar
en vinter → vintrar

·         One-syllable words can take either -ar or -er, usually the former.
en hund → hundar
en färg → färger

Ett-words

·         If they end in a consonant, they have no plural ending.
ett hus → hus
ett barn → barn

·         If they end in a vowel, they take -n.
ett yrke → yrken
ett meddelande → meddelanden

Irregular plurals

There are several irregular plural forms, usually these include changing the main vowel.

en man → män
en mus → möss
en hand → händer
en bok → böcker

The ending -en

It's important to remember that the ending -en can be one of three things:
1. the definite singular of an en-word 
2. the definite plural of an ett-word ending in a consonant 
3. the indefinite plural of an ett-word ending in a vowel 
Beware of this common trap for students of Swedish!

1.       armen the arm 

2.       husen the houses 

3.       äpplen apples