það vs hann/hún: Pronoun for Inanimate Reference

English has one tidy word for every lifeless thing: it. The chair is it, the book is it, the car is it. Icelandic has no such neutral pronoun. To refer back to a thing you've already mentioned, you use the pronoun that matches the noun's grammatical gender — and since most Icelandic nouns are masculine or feminine, that means a great many "its" come out as hann ("he") or hún ("she"). A car is hann; a book is hún; only a neuter noun is það. English speakers reflexively translate every "it" as það, and that single habit produces a steady stream of small errors. This page fixes it.

The rule: the pronoun agrees with the noun's gender

Every Icelandic noun has a fixed gender — masculine (kk.), feminine (kvk.) or neuter (hk.). When a pronoun stands in for that noun, it takes the matching gender, regardless of whether the thing is alive. So:

So "Where is the car? — It's outside" is Hvar er bíllinn? — Hann er úti, literally "He is outside," because bíll is masculine. To an English ear this sounds as if the car were a person, but in Icelandic hann here is simply "it (the masculine one)."

Why this follows from grammatical gender

This is not an odd extra rule — it falls straight out of the fact that Icelandic gender is grammatical, not biological. The gender lives in the noun, not in the thing. A bíll is masculine the way le livre is masculine in French or der Tisch is masculine in German: it's a property of the word. A pronoun's whole job is to stand in for a noun, so naturally it inherits that noun's gender. English lost grammatical gender on inanimate nouns centuries ago and merged them all into "it," which is why this feels foreign — but it's the same logic that German (er/sie/es) and French (il/elle) use.

This also means the same English "it" can be three different Icelandic pronouns depending only on which noun you're referring to. If you switch from talking about a car to talking about a book, "it" switches from hann to hún — the thing is just as lifeless either way; only the grammatical gender changed.

The other það: the dummy / expletive subject

There is a second það that has nothing to do with gender agreement, and you should keep it apart in your mind. This is the dummy (expletive) það — a placeholder subject that fills the front of a clause when there's no real subject, exactly like English "it" in "it's raining" or "there is." Here það refers to nothing at all; it's grammatical filler.

The distinction matters: in Það rignir, það is dummy filler. In Borðið? Það er inni, það is a real pronoun agreeing with the neuter noun borð. They look identical but do completely different jobs. (The dummy/expletive það and its word-order behaviour have their own page, syntax/dummy-það.) When "it" points at a specific gendered noun, agree with the gender; when "it" is clausal or refers to nothing in particular, use það.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Icelandic has no neutral "it." The pronoun for a thing matches the noun's grammatical gender: masculine → hann, feminine → hún, neuter → það.
• A car (bíll, m.) is hann, a book (bók, f.) is hún, a table (borð, n.) is það — animacy is irrelevant; gender decides.
• The same English "it" becomes different Icelandic pronouns as you switch nouns, because the gender lives in the word.
• A separate það is the dummy/expletive subject (Það rignir, Það eru margir…) — filler that refers to nothing, like English "it/there."
• The classic English-speaker error is defaulting to það for every inanimate "it." Use það only for neuter nouns or clausal/unspecified reference; otherwise agree with the gender.