Interactions of grammatical categories: how three genders became two

In Modern Swedish the category of gender has been reduced from three elements to two: the masculine and the feminine have coalesced. The process is assumed to have been complete by the end of the 17th century, as witnessed by the pronominal paradigm, in which the original forms han ‘he’ and hon ‘she’ have been replaced by a demonstrative pronoun den ‘this. This is the only aspect of gender reduction studied so far. As illustrated in the present article on the basis of texts from 1280–1585, the change originated earlier with the formation of the definite article out of the demonstrative pronoun. Here gender reduction is completed by the mid-16th century. Intricate interplay of grammatical categories during the formation of definiteness in Swedish is evident.