In 2012 a nongendered pronoun dropped into Swedish discourse. Today it's widely usedāand it's nudging people to see the world a little differently.
For a question with so much riding on itādoes using politically correct language actually make a person less of a jerk?āthe test was deceptively simple.
Hereās what you do: Show people a sketch of a cartoon personācircle-for-head, ovals for arms and bodyāwith a dotted line linking it to an equally cartoony thing, a balloon-animal dog. Over the personās head loom two thought bubbles, a round one containing three question marks and a jagged one with three exclamation points. Thatās it. And the test is, describe whatās happening.
Importantly, the people being tested, upwards of 2,000 of them, were all native speakers of Swedish, an old language that has learned a new trick. Like English, Swedish used two pronouns to indicate the gender of a person, hon (she) and han (he). But in 2012, a new word dropped into Swedish discourse: hen, a nongendered pronoun that could replace either or both.
So this was the real test. Would native-speaker Swedes, seven years after getting a new pronoun plugged into their language, be more likely to assume this androgynous cartoon was a man? A woman? Either, or neither? Now that they had a word for it, a nonbinary option, would they think to use it?
And they did. Not only did the Swedish speakers use the nonbinary optionto describe the, letās face it, nonbinary human, but in other surveys they deployed hen (as well as han, but the feminine hon, too) to describe people in stories when their genders werenāt specified. Now, itās true the researchers donāt have comparable tests from before 2012, before hen. So this result is, as UCLA political psychologist EfrĆ©n PĆ©rez says, merely suggestive. Still, though, āthis word has no biological associations. Itās from scratch. And itās performing the way some proponents argued it would,ā says PĆ©rez, coauthor of a paper describing these tests in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. āThese language changes can nudge people in directions some folks find normatively worthy.ā
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