I know a whole lot of finns have already made posts about this (and with my notoriously shit memory, I may have already written one too), but too late, I canât be stopped: Finnish pronouns. I canât recall where I got any of this info, and if someone who knows better can verify whether Iâm right or wrong, I welcome it.
The finnish language has the pronouns hĂ€n, which is she/he, and se, which is âitâ. In official written finnish, hĂ€n is the pronoun used of people and people alone, and se is of animals and inanimate objects. But this is where it gets funny. Written finnish is different from all dialects of spoken finnish - no spoken form of finnish naturally uses the pronoun hĂ€n in normal conversation. The entire human pronoun was introduced to the finnish language artificially, as the men who translated the bible to it felt it was ungodly to not at least have a distinct pronoun for beings with an immortal soul.
However, the attempts to introduce the new pronoun soon ended up somewhere along the lines of âok fine, you can call each other whatever, but the king and God are HĂ€n (and please show up to church sober)â, so the whole pronoun more or less ended up as a linguistic equivalent of those fancy plates your grandparents have in a glass cabinet for Extremely Special Guests, and nobody is actually fancy enough to require such formality.
Regardless, this has stuck to spoken finnish, but mainly as a stylistic choice of sardonic people, sarcastically using âhĂ€nâ of people they do not actually respect, heavily implying that this person has far too high opinion of themselves and their own importance.
HĂ€n funnily enough also emerges when some people talk about their pets, though the sarcastic implication of âthis person considers themselves more important than they truly areâ is there - a bossy, spoiled tiny dog is hĂ€n the same way your snobbish and difficult great-aunt is.
There is probably a number of languages that have one or several pronouns that are defined by a personâs status instead of gender, but finnish is the one language that has a formally neutral but informally reverential pronoun, that in spoken use is almost exclusively used sarcastically to communicate that this person actually is not respected.
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