I'm not sure that "hen" has spread quite so much yet that you can expect to use it in English conversation. Nu undrar ju folk varför du kallar OP för en höna. ;)

If anyone is curious what I'm on about, "hen" is a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish that has had a resurgence in the last few years. It's partly politically motivated and a little controversial, since we generally only use gender-specific ones. Sorry for this very off topic aside.

I don't care. Will still use it and educate. I am aware that it might mean höna for some, but I am expecting curiosity to get the better of 'em and hope they look into it.

Unfortunately, "hen" in English means a female chicken (or other bird, e.g. a peacock is male and a peahen is female), so all you achieve is giving the wrong impression that your language skills are lacking, AND you could be making a sexist remark (hen might be misconstrued as a condescending term for a woman), the complete opposite of what you intended.

I think it's a bit weird to be honest. Are other Swedes doing this, trying to shoehorn "hen" into other languages?

I've seen "they", in the singular, used as a gender-neutral English pronoun pretty extensively, perhaps that's worth looking into. Either way, kudos.

English has some invented gender-neutral pronouns as well, such as Zie, Hir, etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neut...