An article written in the The Guardian Newspaper, “Sweden adds gender-neutral pronoun to dictionary,” writes about the addition of gender neutral pronouns (hen, han, and hon) to the Swedish vocabulary. This article claims that the Swedish Academy has officially announced that these gender neutral pronouns will be added to Sweden’s official dictionary effective in April, 2018. The word, “hen,” was originally utilized in the 1960s to simplify gender-neutral language by avoiding the inclusion of “han” and “hon” as well. People quickly saw this word as politically incorrect as it attempted to short-cut the aim of creating gender-neutral language for the transgender community. As such, the word disappeared into obscurity for several years. Then, around the 2000s, the transgender community utilized it again, and the word has become quite popular in recent years. As remarkably one of the new 13,000 words that the Swedish Academy, Sweden’s expert source of additions to the dictionary and Swedish language, “hen,” “han,” and “hon” will make their mark in the transgender community. Now, found in “official texts, court rulings, media texts and books,” “hen” has become a popular word in the Swedish culture (The Guardian).
The power of words is enormous in defining who and what something or someone is. A lack of gender-neutral language in cultures and languages over the world leads to disheartening the transgender and some of the LGBTQ population. Gender-neutral language serves as not only validation, but acceptance of people and their perspectives of who they are and what they mean in a specific society. So, seeing how Sweden has welcomed a uniform gender-neutral set of pronouns and words to represent that population in their culture, speaks to how accepting they are as a people. When I was a resident assistant, I would constantly tell my residents to tell me their preferred pronoun. Providing a safe space where people can freely express themselves through their identifying languages like gender-neutral pronouns means volumes to people who frequently feel judged, misunderstood, or invalidated in who they are. This is a prime example of the Transformational Generative Grammar theory in that it applies to how we fully observe and experience changes in language and acquisitions of new words due to aspects in society like social culture and perspective shifts like the new acceptance of gender preferences (or lack thereof gender entirely), which fosters formation of new pronouns to support these new accepted preferences (Module 2). Additionally, according to certain researchers, the English language in regards to usage of personal pronouns and certain nouns “is a source of sexism in the language” (Module 5). As such, this prevalence of sexism in regards to pronouns in the English language is frustrating to some researchers as “missing from the English language system is a singular third-person pronoun,” like Sweden’s “hen,” that includes both female, male, or any other non-gendered pronouns (Module 5).
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