Impersonal Passives and Expletive det

The ordinary passive promotes an object to subject: Boka ble lest ("The book was read"), where boka was the object of lese. But Norwegian — like German, Dutch and the other Germanic languages, and unlike English — can also passivise verbs that have no object at all. Det ble danset hele natten literally says "it was danced all night," with no dancer and no thing-danced; the expletive det fills the empty subject slot and the verb stands in the passive with its agent deleted. English structurally cannot do this: "It was danced" is impossible. That makes the impersonal passive a near-pure *comprehension target for English speakers — something you must learn to read and recognise, even though your native grammar offers no model for building it. This page assumes you know the basic passive (the bli-passive and the -s passive); here we focus on the impersonal variety and its partnership with expletive det.

The mechanism: passivise the activity, not an object

In a personal passive, the object becomes the subject. In an impersonal passive, there is no object to promote — so the subject slot is filled by the dummy expletive det, and the verb simply asserts that the activity took place, agent unnamed:

Read the literal glosses: danset, ledd, sunget, arbeidet are all intransitive — you don't dance a thing or laugh a thing. English has to repackage them as "there was dancing" or "work is being done," because it cannot leave the verb passive with nobody and nothing as subject. Norwegian just puts det in slot 1 and passivises the activity directly. The natural English translation is almost always an existential ("there was X-ing") or a get/be done paraphrase — there is no word-for-word route.

det as a pure placeholder, held by V2

Why does det appear at all? Because Norwegian main clauses are V2: the first position must be filled. An ordinary passive fills it with the promoted subject; an impersonal passive has no such subject, so the expletive det steps in as a pure syntactic placeholder with no meaning. It is the same dummy det as in det regner ("it's raining") — a slot-filler, not a referent.

Because det is only there to fill slot 1, it disappears when something else takes that slot. Front an adverbial, and det is no longer needed:

In Her må det ryddes, her fills slot 1, the modal må is V2, and det sits after it. In På fredager danses det..., the fronted på fredager takes slot 1, the -s passive danses is V2, and det follows. The placeholder appears exactly when, and only when, nothing else has claimed first position — proof that it is doing structural work, not semantic work.

Both passive forms work

The impersonal passive can use either of Norwegian's two passives. The bli-passive (bli + past participle) reads as more concrete and event-like; the -s passive (verb + -s) reads as more general, habitual or formal:

That last one is worth dwelling on: Det røykes ikke her is the idiomatic Norwegian for a "no smoking" rule. English reaches for a gerund nominalisation ("no smoking") precisely because it cannot passivise the intransitive smoke with a dummy subject. The same logic gives signs like Det parkeres ikke her and Her snakkes det norsk ("Norwegian is spoken here").

Register: formal, official, impersonal

The impersonal passive — especially the -s form — is a marker of formal and official register (academic, bureaucratic, journalistic). It is the natural voice of reports, regulations and minutes, where the writer wants to state that something is being done without naming who:

The clause-embedding versions — Det blir sagt at..., Det forventes at..., Det antas at... — are the impersonal passive of a verb that takes a that-clause; here det is again the expletive holding slot 1, and the real content is the at-clause. These are extremely common in news and academic prose and are the most "translatable" subtype, since English has matching forms ("It is said that...", "It is expected that...").

Why English blocks it

English requires every finite clause to have a subject, and its expletive it / there can only fill that role in specific frames — weather (it's raining), extraposition (it seems that...), existentials (there is...). Critically, English has no expletive that can sit as the subject of a passivised intransitive: there is no grammatical It was danced or There was danced. So when English needs to express the same agentless activity, it must change the structure — nominalise ("there was dancing"), use a generic agent ("people danced"), or use get/be done with a noun. Norwegian's expletive det is more permissive: it can be the subject of any subjectless passive, including those built on intransitives. That single difference is the whole story, and it is why this construction is one to recognise rather than to translate literally.

Common Mistakes

The whole point is that the verb is objectless. There is nothing to promote and nothing to add; det is the only subject, and it is a meaningless placeholder.

There is exactly one det, and it occupies slot 1. It is not a referential pronoun you can repeat or echo.

When på fredager takes first position, the finite verb must come second (V2) and the expletive det moves after it. det surfaces in slot 1 only when nothing else has claimed it.

You cannot turn the activity into a subject noun. Keep the verb passive and let det hold the subject slot; quantity goes adverbially (mye). (Note also the participle ledd, not leet.)

To keep it genuinely impersonal — agent fully deleted — use det + passive + an at-clause, rather than promoting a noun to subject.

Key Takeaways

• Norwegian passivises objectless intransitives (danse, le, arbeide, røyke), filling the empty subject slot with the expletive det; English cannot form this ("*It was danced").
• det is a pure placeholder held by V2: it sits in slot 1 only when nothing else does, and vanishes after a fronted adverbial (Her må det ryddes, På fredager danses det...).
• Both passives work: -s for general/habitual/formal (Det røykes ikke her), bli for specific events (Det ble danset).
• The construction is formal and impersonal in register, and for English speakers is primarily a comprehension item — translate it with "there was X-ing" or "it is X-ed," never word-for-word.