Hen (pronoun)

Hen (Swedish: [ˈhɛnː] ^ⓘ) is a gender-neutral personal pronoun in Swedish^[1] intended as an alternative to the gender-specific hon ("she") and han ("he"). It can be used when the gender of a person is not known or when it is not desirable to specify them as either a "she" or "he". The word was first proposed in 1966, and again in 1994, with reference to the Finnish hän, a personal pronoun that is gender-neutral, since Finnish does not have grammatical genders. However, it did not receive widespread recognition until around 2010, when it began to be used in some books, magazines and newspapers, and provoked media debates and controversy over feminism, wokeness, gender neutrality, and parenting. In July 2014, it was announced that hen would be included in Svenska Akademiens ordlista, the official spelling dictionary of the Swedish Academy. In April 2015, the gender neutral pronoun hen and 13,000 other new words were added in a new official dictionary of the Swedish language. Today, some believe the word has lost some of its feminist-activist connotation in Sweden as it is used in the media, court rulings and books.^[2]

Initially, it was treated as a neologism and faced opposition by some, including the major newspaper Dagens Nyheter that banned it in 2012,^[3] but later started using the pronoun. The Swedish Language Council has not issued any proscriptions against the use of hen, but recommends the inflected forms hens ("her(s)/his") as the possessive form and the object form hen ("her/him") over henom, which also occurs. Hen has two basic usages: as a way to avoid a stated preference to either gender; or as a way of referring to individuals who are agender, genderqueer or non-binary.