If you’ve lived in Sweden for any extended period of time, you may have noticed that there are plenty of dialects and plenty of personal, individual variants (so-called “ideolects”) of Swedish. One particular variation you might happen to notice is the use of han rather than honom as the third-person male object pronoun of a sentence.

In plain English, that’s the word “him”. In Standard Swedish, the subject form “he” is han, while the object form “him” is honom.

But some people use han for both forms “he” and “him”.

Ja, jag såg han igår. – “Yeah, I saw him yesterday.” (Standard Swedish: Ja, jag såg honom igår.) ←object, “him”

Men han såg inte mig. – “But he didn’t see me.” ←subject form, “he”

Why do some people talk like this? How can that be a correct use of Swedish?

The truth is, Standard Swedish is just like Standard English in that “correctness” rules primarily in the domain of written language, not spoken language. I may write rather formally in some of my blog posts, but when I talk to friends (in Swedish or English), I don’t speak as though I’m a book! I use slang, I swear, I don’t articulate every word precisely. And my guess is that you don’t, either, whether it’s in your native language or in English (or Swedish!). Human beings express themselves through the way they speak, and if everyone spoke “correctly”, i.e. the same, then there would be no color to people’s language.

But there’s a reason why some people use han as an object form as well as a subject form. And that reason is historical.

In Old Swedish, there were several object forms. Which form was to be used was decided by either the object’s function in the sentence, the structure of the sentence, or the verb itself. This is a simplified way of saying that Swedish had what is known as a “case system”. German, Icelandic, and most Slavic languages are examples of modern languages that still have a case system.

In Old Swedish, han was one of these object forms and honom was another. The remaining object form is hans, a much rarer form in today’s Swedish dialects. Han was what is known as the accusative form and honom was what is known as the dative form. (Compare Modern Icelandic hann and honum and German ihn and ihm, respectively.)

In other words, the reason why some people might say jag såg han is because a fragment of the Old Swedish case system still survives in the her or his dialect. Han as an object form did not survive in Mälardalen Swedish – the regional dialect which subsequently became Standard Swedish – and that’s why it is not considered “correct” in Standard Swedish. But there are still millions of Swedes who use this form, and most will likely pass it on to their own posterity.

So you decide – can a form used by a large portion of Sweden’s population really be considered “incorrect”? Let me know what you think in the comments!

Ha det bra!