Hen (pronoun)

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.

While Swedish and Danish historically had the same set of three grammatical genders as modern German, with masculine, feminine and neuter, the three-gender system fell out of use from the dialects out of which the respective standard languages were developing sometime in the late Middle Ages.

[4] Attempts to introduce hen as a gender-neutral pronoun date back to 1966 when linguist Rolf Dunås suggested it in the regional newspaper Upsala Nya Tidning.

[6][7] By 2009, Nationalencyklopedin, a modern standard Swedish encyclopedia, had created an article about hen describing it as a "suggested gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of hon and han".

[9] In the February 2012 issue of Nöjesguiden, a Stockholm-based arts and entertainment monthly, hen was used consistently in all texts with the exception of direct quotes.

[19] In May 2015, hen was introduced in legal text (the driver's license law), in the self-ruling area Åland, a part of Finland which is officially Swedish-speaking.

Columnist Lisa Magnusson taunted it as a "mega-feminist piece of poultry",[25] In early 2012, a series of interviews and articles about the use of hen in Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden's leading newspapers, generated widespread debate.

As a reaction to this, journalist and programmer Oivvio Polite created the website dhen.se,[27] a site that mirrored the content of the paper's online edition, but with all instances of han and hon replaced with hen.

An employee at Dagens Nyheter reacted by filing a complaint to the police against dhen.se for violating Swedish copyright law, but later retracted his accusation when the newspaper's management proved unwilling to pursue legal action.

Egalia, a preschool in Södermalm, an upper middle-class borough in central Stockholm, had been at the forefront of gender-neutral pedagogy, and quickly adopted the use of hen.