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En and Ett in Swedish

This document discusses rules that can help learners determine whether a Swedish noun uses 'en' or 'ett'. While there are no absolute rules, statistics show that 74% of nouns are 'en' words and nouns ending in certain letters tend to be more commonly 'en' or 'ett'. Knowing these tendencies can help learners guess the gender of new nouns.

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1K views3 pages

En and Ett in Swedish

This document discusses rules that can help learners determine whether a Swedish noun uses 'en' or 'ett'. While there are no absolute rules, statistics show that 74% of nouns are 'en' words and nouns ending in certain letters tend to be more commonly 'en' or 'ett'. Knowing these tendencies can help learners guess the gender of new nouns.

Uploaded by

hintu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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En and Ett in Swedish

A very rewarding, but sometimes difficult, aspect of learning Swedish is figuring out
the en and ett genders of Swedish nouns. Conventional wisdom (and grammar textbooks)
suggests that there are no set rules for when to use each gender. Instead students need to
memorize this for every noun. Here are some little known rules that can help with
mastering en and ett in Swedish.

The gender (or article) of a noun in Swedish is functionally similar to a or an in English. In


English, nouns beginning with vowels are preceded by an and nouns beginning with
consonants are preceded by a. Similarly in Spanish (in most cases) nouns ending in -a are
preceded by la and other words are preceded by el.

Unfortunately, no such easy rule exists in Swedish. The gender of the noun is extremely
important to learn, because it changes the way the noun is written in definitive form, and if
you use the wrong gender it also sounds wrong, which you’ll quickly start to hear for yourself
as you master the language. A few examples follow:

In the example above, we changed the first letter of the en word mus to “h” and all of a
sudden it is an ett word, hus. Unfortunately, this is not true for all words starting with “h” or
“m”.

How can an aspiring Swedish speaker go about learning the genders? To start with, the best
approach may be to simply memorize the gender when you are memorizing the noun. There
are, however, some tricks you can use when encountering a noun you have not seen before.
DailySwedish.com analyzed all nouns in its database of over 11,000 Swedish nouns and came
up with some key shortcuts:

Tips for learning En and Ett in Swedish

1. 74% of all nouns are en nouns and 26% are ett nouns. Thus, if you are not sure you can
always go with en and more often than not you’ll be correct!
2. By looking at the first letter of the noun alone, you cannot determine if it is
an en or ett noun.
3. The last letter of a noun is a strong determinant of en or ett. Below are a few
examples. Most clearly, if a noun ends in “a” it is an en noun 98% of the time. For
words ending in “m” or “p”, they are more likely than most nouns to be an ett noun, but
still more likely to be an en noun.
4. The last two letters of the noun are an even better indicator to see if it is an en or ett
word. Below are a few more examples.

Using the rules above can get you a long way toward proficiency at en and ett in Swedish. And
remember that while en and ett in Swedish is very important to learn, no one will fault you for
getting it wrong every once in a while. Happy learning!

[content_container max_width=’500′ align=’left’]This article was written by Martin Andersson,


the creator of DailySwedish.com, a Swedish language website, created a quiz that allows
students to practice the genders.[/content_container]

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