Anders Svensson: The word « hen » raises continued feelings
Ten years ago were taken hen Included in the Swedish Academy’s glossary, SAOL. From a linguistic perspective, the decision was easy. After being proposed in the 1950s as gender-neutral pronouns by linguist Karl-Hampus Dahlstedt began hen Establish itself in the general language during the early 2010s. It was simply used enough to place in SAOL.
Within the Swedish Academy was far from all fond. Admittedly, it is not the members themselves who work with the dictionaries. Nor does the Academy have views on the editorial work at the word level. Nevertheless, there were at some members approximately the same resistance to hen Which also made it the biggest language storm of the decade. Someone thought it was too ugly, another too unnecessary, a third too ideologically.
Then as now the editorial choice was reasonable. By 2020, the number also increased hen in the media from year to year. Since then, the mill has leveled out. My annual surveys show that he Nowadays, around a hundred times is more common in the media language than hen while she Is then fifty times more common.
For many of today’s young people, they are not a news but an obvious part of pronoun flora
The language storm has been moaning over the years. But hen continues to awaken emotions.
A recent study conducted at the University of Kristianstad and Lund University shows that attitudes gradually become more positive. Yet it was 2021 – which was the last year in the researchers’ materials – only 30.2 percent who liked hen. When the same question was asked for the first time in 2015, 21.5 percent were positively set. During the same period, the proportion fell from 54.4 to 42.2 percent.
When hen In 2015, SAOL was brought into SAOL, 22.8 percent used the word at least sometimes. Six years later, that figure had risen to 36.9 percent. Although users have become more and the opponents are fewer hen thus far from established with or accepted by all.
The trend towards greater tolerance is expected. For many of today’s young people are not hen A news without an obvious part of the pronoun flora. In addition, the power of habit is great in terms of language. As hen In several contexts, the ideological charge that many wanted to attribute the word in the beginning.
About the same tendency is noticed in my email basket. A decade ago, each chronicle generated about hen Hundreds of upset emails. Nowadays it rarely becomes more than a handful. Although that particular type of lustig cures who consider themselves to have found a heavy counter -argument in that hen Peachly, « hen » in English still does not shine with its absence.
