Sweden’s pronoun battle

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2022

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Sweden has a long history of championing LGBTQ+ rights. But campaigners spent years battling to get the gender-neutral personal pronoun ‘hen’ included in Swedish dictionaries. The word was finally added in 2015. Maddy Savage spoke to Nasim Aghili from the "queer" art collective Ful, which rallied to get the word recognised. This is a Bespoken Media production for the BBC World Service. (Photo: Nasim Aghili. Credit: Thomas Straub)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Maddie Savage
0:11.0	in Stockholm. Sweden has a long history of championing LGBTQ plus rights, but campaigners
0:18.0	here spent years battling to get a gender neutral personal pronoun included in Swedish dictionaries.
0:24.2	The word hen was finally added in 2015. I've been speaking to Nassima Gili, one of the activists who rallied to get the word recognised.
0:35.2	It's 2007 and artist Nassima Gili is editing a magazine called Ful based at a rundown office block in Stockholm.
0:44.2	It was in a very posh area but it was a building that was supposed to be demolished.
0:51.2	There were a lot of art collectives and artists in this building.
0:56.2	I guess you had cheap rent because it was about to be destroyed.
0:59.2	Yes, it was just because of the cheap rent that we could be there at the time.
1:03.2	And this was a time in Stockholm where queer feminism had started to find the platform.
1:10.2	Nassima uses queer as an umbrella term to describe anyone with an LGBTQ plus identity.
1:16.2	The magazine is aimed at the queer community and it's campaigning to get a third personal pronoun recognised in the Swedish language.
1:24.2	So, as well as the words for he and she, Han and Han in Swedish, people could also be identified as hen.
1:33.2	The Swedish language is constructed in that sense that you always consider people to be Hun or Han.
1:41.2	So, we wanted to change that because we had, of course, colleagues, members and also ourselves who used him as their gender identity.
1:50.2	So, they didn't identify with the binary gender identity.
1:54.2	The magazine's journalists always asked people they interviewed which personal pronoun they preferred.
1:59.2	Never assuming how guests wanted to identify.
2:02.2	But they were about to switch to a different strategy that helped shape Swedish language history.
2:08.2	I don't remember who, but someone in this editorial meeting that we had said, like, why shouldn't we just be using Han for everyone?
2:16.2	And everyone was like, yeah, it wasn't a conflict, it wasn't a question.
2:21.2	So, of course, in the magazine we started changing the texts.
	...

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