Editing Grammatical gender (section)

==== Common–neuter contrast ====
Here a masculine–feminine–neuter system previously existed, but the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost in nouns (they have merged into what is called ''common gender''), though not in pronouns that can operate under natural gender. Thus nouns denoting people are usually of common gender, whereas other nouns may be of either gender. Examples include [[Danish language|Danish]] and [[Swedish language|Swedish]]{{crossreference|&nbsp;(see [[Gender in Danish and Swedish]])}}, and to some extent Dutch{{crossreference|&nbsp;(see [[Gender in Dutch grammar]])}}.

The dialect of the old Norwegian capital [[Bergen]] also uses common gender and neuter exclusively. The common gender in Bergen and in Danish is inflected with the same articles and suffixes as the masculine gender in [[Norwegian Bokmål]]. This makes some obviously feminine noun phrases like "a cute girl", "the well milking cow" or "the pregnant mares" sound strange to most Norwegian ears when spoken by Danes and people from Bergen since they are inflected in a way that sounds like the masculine declensions in South-Eastern Norwegian dialects.

The same does not apply to [[Swedish language|Swedish]] common gender, as the declensions follow a different pattern from both the Norwegian written languages. [[Norwegian Nynorsk]], [[Norwegian Bokmål]] and most spoken dialects retain masculine, feminine and neuter even if their Scandinavian neighbors have lost one of the genders. As shown, the merger of masculine and feminine in these languages and dialects can be considered a reversal of the original split in Proto-Indo-European {{crossreference|(see [[#Indo-European|below]])|printworthy=y}}.