Half the finns don’t even use “hän”. In day to day conversations it’s frequently replaced with “se” which is basically “it”, making no difference between living things and inanimate objects. That is not considered impolite or anything like that. It’s more a dialect thing.
I know I’m biased, being a native Finnish speaker and all, but I think it’s kinda delightful that (at least colloquially) we don’t even bother with separating pronouns by animacy.
While speakers of Indo-European languages get worked up over gendered pronouns, we’re like “lol everyone and everything is ‘it’, problem solved, time for beer”
Half the finns don’t even use “hän”. In day to day conversations it’s frequently replaced with “se” which is basically “it”, making no difference between living things and inanimate objects. That is not considered impolite or anything like that. It’s more a dialect thing.
I know I’m biased, being a native Finnish speaker and all, but I think it’s kinda delightful that (at least colloquially) we don’t even bother with separating pronouns by animacy.
While speakers of Indo-European languages get worked up over gendered pronouns, we’re like “lol everyone and everything is ‘it’, problem solved, time for beer”
As a native finn I agree. So much noise and so many impractical solutions for something that we have for all intents and purposes solved millenia ago.