Danish:Gender

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dansk Danish
Family	Sub-family	Language of	Script
Germanic	North Germanic	Denmark, Faroe Island, Greenland, Iceland, [Northern] Germany	Extended Latin

In standard Danish (or rigsdansk) there exist two genders: common and neuter.

History

Historically, Old Norse, and even Early Modern Danish, had three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. At some point down the line, the masculine and feminine merged together into the common (or fælleskøn). This merging led to the creation of a set of Danish:Pronouns#Gender pronouns for both animate and inanimate objects.

Modern Danish

In Danish today, one must make the distinction between just common (fælleskøn) and neuter (intetkøn).

Characterization

Unfortunately, one cannot easily tell which nouns take which gender.

Common

Some basic rules, names of people, plants, animals, trees, festivals, months, and names of rivers will all be [most likely] common. Some notable exceptions: et barn (a child), et menneske (a human being), [ironically] et dyr (an animal), et æsel (a donkey), et bær (a berry), et træ (a tree). It's important to remember that, in a compound noun, the noun will take the gender of whatever the last noun is. So this means that the names of most trees, will actually be neuter, for example: et piltræ(a willow tree), or et cedertræ (a cedar tree.) Also, nouns with the following endings will be common:

Ending	Example
-ance	en ambulance ambulance
-ans	en substans substance
-ant	en repræsentant representative
-de	en lændge length
-dom	en sygdom illness
-ence	en konfrence conference
-ens	en frekvens frequence
-er	en lærer teacher
-hed	en kærlighed love
-isme	socialisme(n) socialism
-ør	en direktør director

Neuter

Typically, nouns referring to substances, areas, localities, and letters of the alphabet are neuter. A couple notable exceptions would be en by (town), and en ø (island). The neuter gender is also shown by a few suffixes:

Ending	Example
-dømmme	et omdømme reputation
-ed	et hoved head
-ende	et udseende appearance
-ri	et bakeri bakery
-um	et museum museum