Grammatical gender in Norwegian (bokmål) - two or three?

Only two grammatical genders here!

The short answer is three. But the answer is also two. Here's why.

First of all, Norwegian does have three genders (male, female and neuter) and you can see this in writing. Male is en, female is ei, and neuter is et. But at the same time it's always permissible to ignore the female gender, combining them into two and resulting in a common gender (en) and a neuter gender (et). Here are some examples:

a house - et hus <-- neuter
a car - en bil <-- common
a girl - en jente, or ei jente <-- common (or female)

Whether to use the female gender or not seems to be a matter of preference, and the dialect in Bergen also uses only two genders as a rule so there's no female grammatical gender there. So from the point of view of the student Norwegian really only has two genders. Yes, you have to understand what female grammatical gender looks like and also know that some people will write the definite article with an -a on the end (instead of -en, so you will see "the book" as either boken or boka) for this, but there is no rule saying that you have to write Norwegian that way so it's simply a matter of recognizing it rather than having to learn and use it yourself.

In fact, a lot of dictionaries (including mine) don't even list the female gender because it's a student dictionary and there's no use in learning a form that not even all Norwegians choose to use themselves.

That being said, how often do Norwegians actually use the female gender in writing? Luckily we have Wikipedia (http://no.wikipedia.org) to reference here. Let's take a look at some words and compare how frequent one is compared to the other.

Bok (book):

ei bok --> 124 results
en bok --> 1,240 results

Jente (girl):

ei jente --> 80 results
en jente --> 165 results

Kvinne (female):

ei kvinne --> 17 results
en kvinne --> 791 results

Mor (mother):

ei mor --> 6 results
en mor --> 81 results

Gate (street):

ei gate: --> 124 results
en gate: --> 427 results

Avling (crop)

ei avling: --> 0 results
en avling: --> 5 results

Sol (sun)

ei sol: --> 6 results
en sol: --> 49 results

Hånd (hand)

ei hånd --> 3 results
en hånd --> 113 results

Suppe (soup)

ei suppe --> 1 result
en suppe --> 13 results




As you can see, two-gender usage is far more common. This is why I don't approve of Norwegian textbooks for foreigners (here's one example from scribd.com) that make it seem as if one has to learn all three genders of nouns, because in practice this isn't even all that common, and it confuses the student at the beginning. I would rather see ei put in parenthesis, like this:

en (ei) bok -- a book
en (ei) hånd -- a hand

...if that. Ideally I think it would be best to just ignore the feminine gender except for a note that it does exist and that you will see it here and there in Norwegian, with a list at the back of the book of common words to keep an eye out for.

Rule of thumb when creating a textbook: if the language has optional forms, and one optional form is not as commonly used as another, don't introduce it except as a footnote to the beginning student regardless of whether it feels more proper or not. Especially when the more common form is easier for beginning students to deal with.