I think I wrote about it before, but probably last year. And since the question keeps coming back, it might be worth to revisit the genitive.
You see, as far as nouns go, and compared to other European languages (Finnish immediately comes to mind here), Swedish is very simple indeed. It has only one case ending, and that’s the genitive (or genitiv, as it’s called in Swedish). You all know what that thingie is, right? The genitive is a form of noun that denotes a person, or a thing, for that matter, that possesses something. In a very broad meaning and context.
In English it’s expressed by the ‘s ending, which, by the way, is often abused and misused. So if you normally struggle with the apostrophe in English, it might be very good news to you that there’s no apostrophe in the Swedish genitive.
So what is there? Not much really. You just stick “s” at the end of the word you want to use in the genitive case. Like this:
- Pers dotter är 12 år. – Per’s daughter is 12 years old.
Simple, isn’t it? It works like that not only with people, but with other nouns, as well.
Like this:
- Sveriges huvudstad heter Stockholm. – The capital of Sweden is Stockholm.
As you can see in the above example, sometimes the genitive case in English is expressed by using “noun+of”. In Swedish you just stick that “s” where needed.
Like this:
- Gatornas namn står på kartan. – The street names are on the map.
In this example, the noun “gator” (streets) already has an ending – “-na” (definite plural). But you still stick that “s” and your work there is done. And also, as you can see, sometimes in English you just use two nouns next to each other to express the idea of the genitive. In Swedish, all you need is that one, small “s”.
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