Danish:Pronouns

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

Personal Pronouns

Number	Person	Nominative	Oblique	Possessive	Reflexive
Singular	1st	jeg	mig	min	min
	2nd	du	dig	din	din
	3rd masc	han	ham	hans	sin
	3rd fem	hun	hende	hendes	sin
	3rd com	den	den	dens	sin
	3rd neu	det	det	dets	sin
Plural	1st	vi	os	vores	vores
	2nd	I¹	jer	jeres	jeres
	3rd	de²	dem	deres	sine

¹ I, meaning the 2nd plural is always capitalized.
² I know what you're thinking, all of those 3rd singular forms come down to just one plural?! And the truth is...yes!

Which third person singular pronoun?!

I know, seeing that monstrous list of third person pronouns can seem pretty scary, huh? Don't worry, it's just there for reference purposes, we'll explain each entry and when to use it right here! :)

Gender

In a typical gendered language, the language will have a separate pronoun for each of the genders. Simple, right? Well in Danish, because it historically had three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, the pronouns are a bit different.

Relatively recently, the masculine and feminine merged into one gender, called the common, which will be called com or simple c. from now on. Now, what happened when the masculine and feminine merged, was that the masculine and feminine pronouns didn't merge. What happened, is that the pronouns remained, but only to be used to describe animate nouns, living things. For inanimate objects, a new set of pronouns rose up, den and det. These are best translated in English, as it.

So which pronoun do you use? Han is used for masculine animate nouns, hun for feminine animate nouns, den for common nouns, or det for neuter nouns.

Reflexive v. Non-Reflexive

To distinguish between saying a third person who is the same as the subject and a third person who isn't, there are two different forms of the possessive pronouns. The reflexive form is used when the subject is the same as the object ex. Han elsker sin kone. meaning He loves his own wife (not somebody else's) The non-reflexive form is used when the subject is not the same as the object ex. Han elsker hans kone. meaning He loves his (somebody else's) wife.

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Contents

Personal Pronouns

Which third person singular pronoun?!

Gender

Reflexive v. Non-Reflexive

See also