Gender neutrality in genderless languages
A genderless language is a natural or constructed language that has no distinctions of grammatical gender—that is, no categories requiring morphological agreement between nouns and associated pronouns, adjectives, articles, or verbs.
The notion of a genderless language is distinct from that of gender neutrality or gender-neutral language, which is wording that does not presuppose a particular natural gender. A discourse in a grammatically genderless language is not necessarily gender-neutral, although genderless languages exclude many possibilities for reinforcement of gender-related stereotypes, such as using masculine pronouns when referring to persons by their occupations. A lack of gendered pronouns is also distinct from a lack of gender in the grammatical sense.
Genderless languages do have various means to recognize gender, such as gender-specific words, as well as gender-specific context, both biological and cultural.
Genderless languages are listed at List of languages by type of grammatical genders. Genderless languages include the Indo-European languages Armenian, Bengali, Persian and Central Kurdish, all the Uralic languages, all the modern Turkic languages, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and most Austronesian languages.
Austronesian languages
Malay
is fundamentally gender-neutral. The third-person singular pronoun dia can mean 'she', 'he' or sometimes 'it', and the object/possessive suffix -nya can mean 'her/her', 'him/his' or 'it/its'. For example, dia mencintainya means 'she/he loves her/him/it'.Most nouns that refer to people are also gender-neutral, and need to be qualified when gender is to be expressed. For example, anak means 'child', and is used far more frequently than the gender-specific phrases anak perempuan, 'female child' and so 'girl', and anak lelaki, 'male child' and so 'boy'. Likewise, the words doktor, pelayan and most other nouns that are attributable to people are gender-neutral, and need to be modified by the adjectives perempuan or lelaki to become gendered. However, Malay vocabulary has many nouns borrowed from Arabic and Sanskrit that do indicate gender. For example, an Islamic religious teacher is either an ustaz or an ustazah, and a noble person is either a puteri or a putera.
Tagalog
, like most Austronesian languages, is gender-neutral.However, because Tagalog has had over three centuries of Spanish influence, gender is usually differentiated in certain Spanish loanwords by way of the suffixes -a and -o. These words mostly refer to ethnicities, occupations, and family. Some examples are: Pilipina/Pilipino and their derivative nicknames Pinay/Pinoy, tindera/tindero, inhinyera/inhinyero, tita/tito, manang/manong, and lola/lolo. Chinese has also lent a few, mostly relating to kinship terminology such as ate and kuya.
Georgian
Georgian is a gender-neutral language. Pronouns and nouns do not have any grammatical gender. For example, the third person singular pronoun "ის" can refer to a woman, man, animal, or non-human object.Finno-Ugric languages
Estonian
In Estonian the word ta is gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". The suffix -tar or -nna can be added to the end of some words to make them feminine, although these nouns are in their basic form gender-neutral: laulja, lauljatar or lauljanna ; näitleja —näitlejanna or näitlejatar. Adding the suffix is an option and most often just the basic, gender-neutral form is used for both sexes. The suffix can be used to stress the femininity if needed. In very few cases there are separate words like esinaine and esimees. Most of the professions are gender-neutral: politseinik, arst, müüja, õpetaja, sõdur, ehitaja, even lüpsja. A well-known exception is med. õde.Finnish
has only gender-neutral pronouns and completely lacks grammatical gender. The word hän is gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". As in Estonian, the suffix -tar or -tär can be added to some words to make them feminine if required, for example näyttelijä, näyttelijätär, but these forms are not commonly used anymore; using the basic word for all genders, equally meaning female/male professions is the norm. However, the feminine form of kuningas which is kuningatar, is a common word, as it is the only word for queen in the Finnish language. There are also some professions or expressions of which the word mies is an integral part, for example, puhemies, meaning Speaker ; palomies, fireman, etc. These are mostly retained in their traditional forms, unless a suitable gender-free word is easily available. As a special case the Speaker of the Finnish Parliament is referred as puhemies irrespective of the actual gender—either herra puhemies or rouva puhemies.Some words are clearly masculine or feminine. For example, in Finnish there is only a "Fatherland". There is also only a "mother" tongue.
Hungarian
does not have gender-specific pronouns and lacks grammatical gender. Referring to a gender needs explicit statement of "the woman" and "the man". The third person singular pronoun ő means "she/he" and plural ők means "they". Hungarian does distinguish persons from things, as the latter are referred to as az or azok. This is however true only one way by using ő or ők may refer only to person while in some contexts az or azok may refer either to persons or things.However, there is a way to distinguish between female/male persons having a certain profession by adding -nő to the end of the words when signifying woman's profession like for example színész+nő while the basic is színész or rendőr+nő while the basic form rendőr means literally "order+guard", i.e. "policeperson".
Indo-European languages
Armenian
In Armenian, neither pronouns nor nouns have grammatical gender. The third person pronoun նա means both he and she. And նրանք is for they.Bengali
lacks grammatical gender. Pronouns and adjectives do not change regardless of the gender being addressed. Semantic gender does exist in nouns, although it would still be considered grammatically valid to omit gendered nouns when not explicitly describing the gender of the subject.English
lacks grammatical gender, but can be considered to have a pronominal gender system with semantic gender represented in the pronouns. This system of gender is quite minimal compared to languages with grammatical gender.Historically, "he" referred to a generic person whose gender is unspecified in formal language, but the gender-neutral singular they has long been common in informal language, and is becoming increasingly so in formal language. The use of the neuter pronoun 'it' in reference to a person is considered dehumanizing.
Kurdish
While Kurdish has two grammatical genders, none of the Kurdish languages have gender pronouns; thus the third person singular pronoun ew refers to "he", "she" and "it".Persian
is commonly considered a genderless language, but can be considered to have a pronominal gender system with common and neuter genders represented in the pronouns. For both males and females, the same nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are used. For example,- u is used for both "he" and "she" ;
- ishān is used for both "he" and "she" but in formal contexts and writing;
- ān is used for "it".
U labash rā busid means "He kissed her lips" or "she kissed his lips" or "he kissed his lips" or "she kissed her lips" or even "a person of indeterminate gender kissed another person of indeterminate gender's lips." If we consider -ash as an object pronoun we can translate the sentence as "she/he kissed her/him on the lips".
Indo-Aryan languages
In Assamese, Bengali, Maithili, Nepali and Oriya, there are different nouns for professions, but they are not commonly used, so these languages have become gender-neutral. In addition, objects, pronouns and almost all adjectives are gender-neutral.In all of these languages, nouns that denote male and female beings are sometimes distinguished by suffixation or through pairs of lexically differing terms. Beyond this, nouns are otherwise not overtly marked.
Other natural languages
Japanese
has no grammatical gender or number. Thus, can mean one or many male doctors, one or many female doctors, or many male and female doctors. Another example of the lack of European-style gender in this language is the use of compound characters. The sha in and the ja in are the same character. Pronouns are generally avoided unless the meaning is unclear.The plural of kare,, which refers to groups of males, may also refer to groups of females and is preferable to the rather demeaning Gender-neutral language modification advocates suggest avoiding karera by instead using "those people", which they commend as gender-neutral, grammatical and natural-sounding. However, until the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century, was used for both genders; meant "girlfriend", as it still does.
Although Japanese has no grammatical gender, certain words and expressions semantically refer specifically to males or specifically to females. The language spoken by Japanese women is markedly different from the speech of Japanese men in terms of vocabulary, use of grammar and idioms, pronunciation, etc.
An increasing number of Japanese avoid the traditional common terms for " wife" and " husband", which literally mean "the person in the back " and "the master". Japanese custom has also dictated that women are expected to use a polite form of language in more situations than men. This expectation has diminished more among urban young female Japanese in the past decade.
The major issues with regard to gendered language in Japanese refer to overall speech patterns. There exists a "woman's language" . Women's speech has different sentence endings from that of men, especially in non-polite speech. A good example is the gender-neutral use of watashi or watakushi for "I" in polite speech. In informal speech, women are still more likely to use watashi or atashi, while men use boku, ore or washi. Women's speech is characterized by sentences ending with wa and by dropping the verbs da or desu. Male speech never drops the word da in a sentence. The differences are quite intricate, but very persistent, and there is little or no movement in Japan to change male/female speech patterns, since changes can sound awkward or confusing. However, some historians note that over time Japanese usage as a whole is shifting toward the feminine forms. Before recent times, men never used words like kane with the honorific prefix o-. Today okane is standard Japanese and is used by men in non-polite situations, something unthinkable a hundred years ago.
Korean
does not use pronouns in everyday language, relying on context to clarify the intended meaning. In case of confusion, there are pronouns to clarify the position, but normally the actual subject is named rather than the pronoun. As for job titles, these are not gender-specific. Again, the meaning is normally clear in the context.Turkish
is a gender-neutral language, like most other Turkic languages. Nouns have a generic form and this generic form is used for both males and females. For example, doktor, eczacı, mühendis etc. Very few words for person reference contain a clue to the gender of the referred person, such as anne/baba "mother/father", kız/oğlan "girl/boy", hanım/bey "lady/sir"The Turkish equivalent to "he", "she", and "it" is o. For example:
There are a few exceptions, where it is mandatory to provide gender :
Very minor exceptions were constructed from native Turkish words after the 1900s:
However, there is an alternative gender neutral use for words like these, which has become more popular in the 2000s:
At the same time research has shown a significant presence of semantically-implied genderness in Turkish. In addition to the absence of semantic gender neutrality it was also noted that the usage of gender markings in Turkish is asymmetrical. In translations of sentences from English texts where the gender is evident it was noticed that feminine gender was marked in 50% of cases, while masculine was marked only in 5% of cases. While translations are not typically representative of linguistic data, similar asymmetry was also observed in Turkish literary and newspaper texts.
Yoruba
Yoruba is a Kwa language spoken in Nigeria, referred to by its native speakers as Ede Yoruba. Yoruba is a gender neutral language. Gendered pronouns such as he or she do not exist in Yoruba language. Words like brother, sister, son and daughter also do not exist. Instead, the most important organizing category is age. Therefore, people are classified by whether they are égbǫn or aburo. In order to say brother, one would need to say "aburo mi okunrin". Male and female are also quite unlike man and woman in the English language. "Obinrin" and "okunrin" which mean "one who has a vagina" and "one who has a penis" are used to mean female and male respectively. Due to European colonization, western pronouns are becoming more widespread.Ewe
is a Gbe language spoken in Ghana and Togo. Ewe is a largely gender neutral language. Gendered pronouns such as he or she do not exist in the Ewe language; instead, the third person singular pronoun e refers to "he", "she" and "it". However, there are separate words for woman and man, as well as male or female members of a family. Family members are also distinguihed by whether they are maternal or paternal and also by relative age.When the pronouns are used, speakers rely on context or the naming of the actor as man or woman or thing to specify who or what is being referred to.
The Ewe use a system of giving the first name to a child, based on the day of the week that the child was born and the gender it was assigned at birth.
Basque
The Basque language is largely gender-free. Most nouns have no gender, though there are different words for females and males in some cases. Some words are differentiated according to gender, like in the English language, but they are not the main rule. For animals, there are particles or different words.While there are no gender-specific pronouns, Basque verbs can agree allocutively with the gender in the intimate singular second person : hik dun, "you have it"; hik duk, "you have it". The verb is marked for addressee's gender, if they are intimate singular, whether or not they are referred to in the clause.
Non-sexism supporters propose substituting those forms by the more formal ones: zuk duzu "you have it".
In earlier stages, the relation between hik and zuk was like that of you and thou in early modern English. Some Basque dialects already avoid hik as too disrespectful.
Swahili
is a Bantu language spoken in many parts of Africa such as Kenya and Tanzania. It is largely gender neutral in specific nouns. Words such as actor/actress and waiter/waitress are gender neutral among most others in the language. The words he, him, she, her translate to a single word in Swahili, yeye.There are gender specific words for man/woman and mother/father, so it is not completely gender neutral, although a vast majority of the words do not distinguish between male or female. The language does not have a grammatical gender either.
Chinese
The Chinese language or languages/topolects are largely gender-neutral, and possess few linguistic gender markers.Comprehension of written and spoken Chinese is almost wholly dependent on word order, as it has no inflections for gender, tense, or case. There are also very few derivational inflections; instead, the language relies heavily on compounding to create new words. A Chinese word is thus inherently gender-neutral, but any given word can be preceded by an adjective/root indicating masculinity or femininity. For example, the word for "doctor" is yīshēng and can only be made gender-specific by adding the root for "male" or "female" to the front of it; thus to specify a male doctor, one would need to prefix nán 男, as in nányīshēng. Under normal circumstances, both male and female doctors would simply be referred to as yīshēng. Tā can mean "he", "she", or "it". However, the different meanings of tā are written with different characters: "他", containing the human radical "亻", from "人", meaning person, for he or a person of undetermined gender; "她", containing the feminine radical "女", for "she"; and "它" for "it"; "祂" containing the spirit radical "礻", from "示", for deities; "牠" containing the cow radical "牜", from "牛", for animals.
The character for "she", containing the "woman" radical, was invented in the early twentieth century due to western influence; prior to this, the character indicating "he" today was used for both genders — it contains the "person" radical, which, as noted above, is not gender-specific.
Cantonese
In written Cantonese, the third-person singular pronoun is keui5, written as ; it may refer to people of either gender because Chinese does not have gender roles as English in third-person pronouns. The practice of replacing the "亻" radical with "女" to specifically indicate the female gender may also be seen occasionally in informal writing; however, this is neither widely accepted nor grammatically or semantically required, and the character 姖 has a separate meaning in standard Chinese.Pipil
, like other Uto-Aztecan languages, is a gender-neutral language. The word yaja is gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". Even though, the preffix siwa can be added to the end of some words to make them feminine, these nouns are in their basic form gender-neutral: piltzin, siwapiltzin. This is rather common. Nevertheless, most of the professions are gender-neutral: tamachtiani, tisewiani, tapajtiani, takwikani, tasumani, mutaluani, even tajkwiluani. Some exceptions concerning gender would be siwateutzin and siwataktuani.The only definite article in Pipil is the word ne, denoting person or thing already mentioned, under discussion, implied, or otherwise presumed familiar to the listener or reader.
"Ne" can be used with both singular and plural nouns, with nouns of any gender, and with nouns that start with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different articles in those situations.
Quechuan
, spoken in the central Andes, are agglutinative using only suffixes, but have no gender suffix.With the exception of mama and tata, and wallpa and k'anka, no nouns are gender-specific. In Southern Quechuan, qhari and warmi are very seldom used along with a noun referring to a person, as in warmi wawa and qhari wawa for daughter and son. For animals urqu and china serve the same purpose, as in urqu khuchi and china khuchi for pig and sow.
No pronouns distinguish gender, the third singular pay being he/she/it.
Dravidian languages
have a gender-neutral form for the third-person plural, which is also used for the third-person singular in all formal communication. Most job titles are derived from this form as they are mostly used in a formal context. They are thus gender-free. It is commonly used to address also, people of higher status, age or stature.Constructed languages
Esperanto
follows the pattern of more natural languages in assigning the male genders to specific roles, and further deriving the female term from that. The generic form of nouns is the same as the male form and different from the female form—for example, doktoro means "doctor", while doktorino means "female doctor". Some words, like ', are intrinsically masculine, but there is no root word to express "a parent".The prefix ge- may be used for groups of mixed sex, for example, '. Reformers have used ge- to create explicitly sex-neutral singulars such as gepatro, "a parent". Though not generally adopted, this usage has appeared in some authoritative reference works.
Explicitly marked feminine forms such as ' may be used to emphasize the noun's female character, but unmarked forms are also commonly used for females. Reformers have proposed morphologically well-formed but rarely used forms like ' and neologisms like -iĉ- to emphasize maleness. The first form is somewhat insufficient because ' traditionally means "man, male", but does not really show any male lexeme or morpheme, ' meaning "woman". This is discussed about, some people prefer ' for "man, male" as opposed to '.
Concerning pronouns there is much discussion: ŝi is clearly female, like English she. For male persons li is used and for animals as well as for inanimate objects ĝi. It is not clear however what form to use when a person of unknown sex is spoken of. It is officially accepted, though very rarely practiced, to use ĝi in this case. Also li is officially accepted to refer to both sexes, what of course causes some opposition. There are some suggestions for neologisms like ŝli or ri. On the other hand, some people consider li to be sex-neutral, and recommend a new only-male pronoun, e. g. hi.
Arguments about the character and implications of "gendered" or "sexist" features in Esperanto closely parallel those raised for other, particularly European languages.
Ido
In Ido, only two couples of nouns are gender-specific: viro-muliero and patro-matro. Other nouns referring to people, and all nouns referring to animals can equally be used to refer to a male or female: doktoro, frato, hundo. And even the two pairs of words above have related nouns that are ambiguous about gender: homo, adulto, genitoro.When it is necessary to specify the gender, the suffixes -in for females, and -ul for males is inserted right before the final -o of any noun referring to either human beings or animals. Thus, from frato the words fratino and fratulo can be obtained. However these forms are to be used only if the gender is relevant for the context, as in the following examples:
- El esas mea sola fratino.
- El esas mea sola frato.
- Me ne prizas doktorini.
- Me ne prizas doktori.
Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos doktoro e lu decidez quon me agos
Since I don't know whether a male or female doctor will come, I cannot use here il or el. And I definitely cannot use ol since I know for a fact that the doctor who comes is going to be a human being.
Now if instead of "a" doctor, I decided to call "my" doctor, I could use any of the following:
- Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos mea doktoro ed il decidez quon me agos
- :
- Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos mea doktoro ed el decidez quon me agos
- :
- Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos mea doktoro e lu decidez quon me agos
- :
In the third person plural, all of these pronouns have a correlative: ili, eli, and oli. And li if no gender-specificity is required or even possible. In practice, the first three pronouns are usually avoided unless a point wants to be made as to the gender of the people referred, or in complex sentences, where gender information is given to clarify the meaning. For example:
La matri e sua filii recevis la premio quan eli decidis.
.
Me pruntis ta libri de mea amiki, e nun me ne povas trovar oli.
Lingua Franca Nova
completely lacks grammatical gender. The word el means "she/her" and "he/him", and lo is used for "it". If gender is significant, one may use words such as la fem, la om, la xica, la xico, etc..Terms for various professions are gender neutral, as are terms for animals. If need be, mas or fema can be used as adjectives for "male" and "female", respectively. Certain traditional roles have -esa for the female, such as prinsesa, contesa, etc. Most family terms distinguish male and female by varying the final vowel, such as tia/tio, fia/fio, ava/avo etc.. Only madre/padre and sore/frate use distinct terms.
Interlingua
is an auxiliary language that was developed to have a widely international vocabulary and a very simple grammar. In Interlingua, nouns have no gender except to reflect natural sex. For example, the words homine and femina are masculine and feminine, respectively, but persona has no gender. Adjectives are invariable and so never have to agree in gender with the nouns they modify. There is a separate nongender pronoun and the possessive pronoun su is gender-neutral.Nouns such as professor and conductor denote both men and women, but specifically feminine forms such as professora conductora have been used occasionally over time. Interlingua has largely escaped charges of sexism, perhaps because the language changes easily as social values change.