Norwegian pronouns: personal, possessive and reflexive (seg and sin)

The subject pronouns are jeg, du, han, hun, den, det, vi, dere and de, and each has an object form used after a verb or a preposition. The system works like English I/me and he/him, so the main job is learning the words.

• Ham is the traditional written object form; in speech many people also say han as the object, and bokmål accepts it.
• “It” depends on the noun’s gender: den for en-words, det for et-words: Bilen? Den er ny. / Huset? Det er stort.
• Det is also the dummy subject in Det regner (“it’s raining”), just like English “it”.
• Dere is plural “you”. The old formal De is very rarely used today.

Jeg sounds roughly like “yay”, and meg, deg, seg roughly like “my, dye, sigh”: the g is silent. De and dem are pronounced the same in much of the country, roughly “dom”, which is why even Norwegians mix them up in writing.

Possessives agree with the thing owned, and the usual position is after the noun in its definite form: bilen min (“my car”, literally “the car mine”), huset vårt (“our house”). Putting it first (min bil) is also correct, but sounds emphatic or formal.

Mi and di are used only with feminine nouns written with -a: boka mi. If you write the feminine with -en, use min: boken min. Hans, hennes and deres never change.

• Dette er mannen min.

  This is my husband.

• Hvor er nøklene dine?

  Where are your keys?

• Barnet vårt går i barnehagen.

  Our child goes to nursery.

Seg is the third-person reflexive, like “himself/herself/themselves”: Han vasker seg (“he washes himself”). The other persons use the normal object form: jeg vasker meg, du vasker deg, vi vasker oss.

• å sette seg

  to sit down

• å legge seg

  to go to bed

• å gifte seg

  to get married

• å føle seg

  to feel (ill, tired…)

• å glede seg til

  to look forward to

Many of these verbs are not reflexive in English, so learn them with seg: Jeg gleder meg til ferien (“I’m looking forward to the holiday”). Watch the position too: after inversion the pronoun follows the subject, I dag føler jeg meg bedre. See Norwegian word order for why.

Use sin/si/sitt/sine when the thing belongs to the subject of the same clause, and hans/hennes when it belongs to someone else. English “his” is ambiguous here; Norwegian is not.

• Per vasker bilen sin.

  Per is washing his (own) car.

• Per vasker bilen hans.

  Per is washing his car (another man’s).

• Kari ringer moren sin.

  Kari is calling her (own) mother.

• Kari og mannen hennes bor i Bergen.

  Kari and her husband live in Bergen.

  Sin is not possible here: it is part of the subject.