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How do grammatical genders differ among Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese?
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Scandinavian languages
Distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.
The grammatical gender systems across the Scandinavian languages vary in how they categorize nouns.1
- Icelandic, Faroese, and New Norwegian: These languages preserve the traditional three-gender system, which includes masculine, feminine, and neuter genders.12
- Danish and Swedish: These languages have merged the masculine and feminine genders into a single "common" (or non-neuter) gender, resulting in a two-gender system consisting of common and neuter.1
- Dano-Norwegian (Bokmål): This language occupies a middle ground, as it vacillates between the two-gender system found in Danish and the three-gender system characteristic of Norwegian dialects.2
In languages that exhibit grammatical gender, nouns require agreement or concord with other parts of speech, such as adjectives and pronouns, which must vary in form to match the noun's gender class.3