Stugan är inte min. The Stuga by Mats Hagwall. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

In my last post, The Swedish Definite Form – Demonstrative Pronouns, I messed up. I wrote the following sentence: Detta röda hus är min. This red house is mine.

See what I did wrong? Min. It should have been mitt. Detta röda hus är mitt. Why? Because hus is an ett-word. Ett hus.

When you’re working with possessive pronouns in English, it’s pretty easy. My dog, my house, my cars. Your dog, your house, your cars. Her dog, her house, her cars. You get the idea. The possessive pronoun doesn’t change much. It doesn’t care about en– or ett-words or even if a word is singular or plural.

It’s a little different in Swedish. Just like so many aspects of Swedish grammar, you have to make sure that the nouns you’re working with match with the rest of your sentence, whether that is an adjective, a demonstrative pronoun, or a possessive pronoun like min, mitt, mina.

Let’s take a look at a few examples:
Har du sett mitt barn? Have you seen my child?
Hon älskar min hund. She loves my dog.
Jag vill skriva en bok om mina barn och mina hundar. I want to write a book about my children and my dogs.

In the plural, you’re going to use mina whether the noun you’re describing is an en-word or an ett-word so even though barn is an ett-word and hund is an en-word, when you’re talking about them in their plural forms, they will both be described using mina. Mina barn. Mina hundar.

There are a whole bunch of possessive pronouns in Swedish and the rules are going to be the same. Have an en-word that you want to possess? Or maybe an ett-word? Maybe it’s even a plural! Take a look at the chart below for the different forms of Swedish possessive pronouns:

P.S. Seriously, if you see something and it seems wrong, leave a comment! If it’s a typo and we just messed up, we’ll fix it. If it’s not wrong, we’ll be happy to explain.