Third-person pronoun


A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener.
The English pronouns he and she are third-person personal pronouns specific to the gender of the person.
The English pronoun they is an epicene third-person pronoun that can refer to plural antecedents of any gender and, informally, to a singular antecedent that refers to a person, the "singular they".
Many of the world's languages do not have gender-specific pronouns. Some languages that do have gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a traditional grammatical gender system, where all or the vast majority of nouns are assigned to gender classes and adjectives and other modifiers must agree with them in that; but a few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack traditional grammatical gender and in such languages gender usually adheres to "natural gender".
Problems of usage may arise in languages like English which have pronominal gender systems, in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown gender is being referred to but commonly available pronouns are gender-specific. In such cases a gender-specific, usually masculine, pronoun is sometimes used with a purported gender-neutral meaning; such use of he was common in formal English between the 1700s and the latter half of the 20th century. Use of singular they is another common alternative dating from the 1300s, but proscribed by some.
Pronouns such as who and which are not discussed here, though similar but different consideration may apply to them.

Grammar patterns

Some languages of the world do not have gender distinctions in personal pronouns, just as most of them lack any system of grammatical gender. In others, such as many of the Niger–Congo languages, there is a system of grammatical gender, but the divisions are not based on sex. Pronouns in these languages tend to be naturally gender-neutral.
In other languages – including most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages – third-person personal pronouns intrinsically distinguish male from female. This feature commonly co-exists with a full system of grammatical gender, where all nouns are assigned to classes such as masculine, feminine and neuter. However, in some languages, such as English, this general system of noun gender has been lost, but gender distinctions are preserved in the third-person pronouns.
In languages with grammatical gender, even pronouns which are semantically gender-neutral may be required to take a gender for such purposes as grammatical agreement. Thus in French, for example, the first- and second-person personal pronouns may behave as either masculine or feminine depending on the sex of the referent; and indefinite pronouns such as quelqu'un and personne are treated conventionally as masculine, even though personne as a noun is only feminine regardless of the sex of the referent.
Issues concerning gender and pronoun usage commonly arise in situations where it is necessary to choose between gender-specific pronouns, even though the sex of the person or persons being referred to is not known, not specified, or mixed. In English and many other languages, the masculine form has sometimes served as the default or unmarked form; that is, masculine pronouns have been used in cases where the referent or referents are not known to be female. This collective masculine is also the case in ancient languages, like Classical Greek and Biblical Hebrew and have influenced the modern forms. This leads to sentences such as:
As early as 1795, dissatisfaction with this convention led to calls for gender-neutral pronouns, and attempts to invent pronouns for this purpose date back to at least 1850, although the use of singular they as a natural gender-neutral pronoun in English has persisted since the 14th century.

English

Standard usage

The English language has gender-specific personal pronouns in the third-person singular. The masculine pronoun is he ; the feminine is she ; the neuter is it. The third-person plural they and its inflected and derived forms are gender-neutral and also used to refer singular, personal antecedents
Generally speaking, he refers to males, and she refers to females. When a person has adopted a persona of a different gender, pronouns with the gender of the persona are used when referring to that apart from the usual identity of the person. Pronouns are sometimes reversed in gay slang. He and she are normally used for humans; use of it can be dehumanizing, and thus inappropriate, but it is sometimes used for a baby when there is no antecedent such as son or daughter and its sex is irrelevant or distracting. It is normally used for animals, but he or she can be used for an animal when the speaker wants to indicate the animal's sex or there is a higher degree of empathy with the animal, as is more likely with pets, domesticated animals, and other "higher" animals, such as elephants. He or she are used for an animal that is referred to by a proper name.
The other English pronouns do not make male–female gender distinctions, that is, they are gender-neutral. The only distinction made is between personal and non-personal reference.
She is sometimes used for named ships and countries, but this may be considered old-fashioned and is in decline. In some local dialects and casual speech he and she are used for various objects and named vehicles. Animate objects like robots and voice assistants are often assumed to have a gender and sometimes have a name with a matching gender.
For people who are transgender, style guides and associations of journalists and health professionals advise use of the pronoun preferred or considered appropriate by the person in question. When dealing with clients or patients, health practitioners are advised to take note of the pronouns used by the individuals themselves, which may involve using different pronouns at different times. This is also extended to the name preferred by the person concerned. LGBTQ advocacy groups also advise using the pronouns and names preferred or considered appropriate by the person concerned. They further recommend avoiding gender confusion when referring to the background of transgender people, such as using a title or rank to avoid a gendered pronoun or name.
There is no universal agreement on a gender-neutral third-person pronoun which could be used for a person whose gender is unknown or who has a non-binary gender identity; various alternatives are described in the following sections.

''It'' and ''one'' as gender-neutral pronouns

Whereas "he" and "she" are used for entities treated as people, the pronoun "it" is normally used for entities not regarded as persons, though the use of "he" or "she" is optional for animals of known sex. Quirk et al. give the following example, illustrating use of both "it" and "her" to refer to a bird:
The pronoun "it" can also be used of children in some circumstances, for instance when the sex is indefinite or when the writer has no emotional connection to the child, as in a scientific context.
Quirk et al. give the following example:
According to The Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing, it is sometimes the "obvious" choice for children.
Examples given include:
but also the more colloquial
"It" may even be used when the child's sex is known. In the following story, the characters refer to the boy-child at the center of the narrative as a "he", but then the narrator refers to it as an "it":
In this case, the child has yet to be developed into a character that can communicate with the reader.
However, when not referring specifically to children, "it" is not generally applied to people, even in cases where their gender is unknown.
Another gender-neutral pronoun that can be used to refer to people is the impersonal pronoun "one". This can sometimes be used to avoid gender-specification issues; however, it cannot normally substitute for a personal pronoun directly, and a sentence containing "he" or "she" would need to be rephrased, probably with a change of meaning, to enable "one" to be used instead. Compare:
In everyday language, generic you is often used instead of one:
It may be that forms of the pronoun he had been used for both sexes during the Middle English and Modern English periods. "There was rather an extended period of time in the history of the English language when the choice of a supposedly masculine personal pronoun said nothing about the gender or sex of the referent." An early example of prescribing the use of he to refer to a person of unknown gender is Anne Fisher's 1745 grammar book A New Grammar. Older editions of Fowler also took this view.
This may be compared to usage of the word man for humans in general.
While the use, in formal English, of he, him or his as a gender-neutral pronoun has traditionally been considered grammatically correct, such use may also be considered to be a violation of gender agreement.
The generic he has increasingly been a source of controversy, as it appears to reflect a bias towards men and a male-centric society, and against women. The 19th and 20th centuries saw an upsurge in consciousness and advocacy of gender equality, and this has led in particular to preferences for gender-neutral language. The usage of generic he has declined in favor of other alternatives.
It has also been seen as prejudicial by some, as in the following cases:
Its use in some contexts may give a jarring or ridiculous impression:
She has traditionally been used as a generic pronoun when making generalizations about people belonging to a group when most members of that group are assumed to be female:
This avoidance of the "generic" he is seen by proponents of non-sexist writing as indicating that the purportedly gender-neutral he is in fact not gender-neutral since it "brings a male image to mind". Since she brings a female image to mind, it isn't either.

Singular ''they''

Since at least the 14th century, they has been used, with varying degrees of general acceptance, to refer to a singular antecedent. This usage is often called the singular they. Today, it is unexceptional and often not regarded as incorrect, especially in informal language.
Though the "singular they" has a singular antecedent, it is used with a plural verb form.
They may be used even when the gender of the subject is obvious; they implies a generic rather than individuated interpretation:
The periphrastics "he or she", "him or her", "his or hers", "himself or herself" are seen by some as resolving the problem, though they are cumbersome. These periphrases can be abbreviated in writing as "he/she", "he", "s/he", "him/her", "his/her", "himself/herself", but are not easily abbreviated in verbal communication. With the exception of "he" and "s/he", a writer still has the choice of which pronoun to place first.

Alternation of ''she'' and ''he''

Authors sometimes employ rubrics for selecting she or he such as:
Historically, there were two gender-neutral pronouns native to English dialects, ou and a. According to Dennis Baron's Grammar and Gender:
Baron goes on to describe how relics of these gender-neutral terms survive in some British dialects of Modern English, and sometimes a pronoun of one gender might be applied to a person or animal of the opposite gender.
In some West Country dialects, the pronoun er can be used in place of either he or she, although only in weak positions such as in tag questions.
More recently, in the city of Baltimore, and possibly other cities in the United States, yo has come to be used as a gender-neutral pronoun.
Various proposals for the use of other non-standard pronouns have been introduced since at least the 19th century.
According to Dennis Baron, the neologism that received the greatest partial mainstream acceptance was Charles Crozat Converse's 1884 proposal of thon, a contraction of "that one" :
"Co" was coined by feminist writer Mary Orovan in 1970. "Co" is in common usage in intentional communities of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, and "co" appears in the bylaws of several of these communities. In addition to use when the gender of the antecedent is unknown or indeterminate, some use it as gender-blind language and always replace gender-specific pronouns.
Several variants of ze have been proposed, with different object forms, to meet the need of unspecified gender situations and transgender persons. Kate Bornstein, an American transgender author, used the pronoun forms ze and hir in the book "Nearly Roadkill: an Infobahn erotic adventure" in 1996. Jeffrey A. Carver, an American science fiction writer, used the pronoun hir in the novel "From a Changeling Star" for a different-gendered nonhuman, in 1989.

List of standard and non-standard third-person singular pronouns

Indo-European languages

In most Indo-European languages third-person personal pronouns are gender-specific, while first- and second-person pronouns are not. The distinction is found even in languages which do not retain a masculine–feminine grammatical gender system for nouns generally, such as English and Danish. Sometimes the distinction is neutralized in the plural, as in most modern Germanic languages, and also in modern Russian. However some languages make the distinction in the plural as well, as with French ils and elles; Czech oni and ony; or Greek αυτοί and αυτές, for respectively masculine and feminine equivalents of "they". It is traditional in most of these languages, in cases of mixed or indeterminate gender, to use the masculine as a default.

Romance languages

For example, in French,
are all gender-inclusive; but
The choice of possessive pronoun in many Romance languages is determined by the grammatical gender of the possessed object; the gender of the possessor is not explicit. For instance, in French the possessive pronouns are usually sa for a feminine object, and son for a masculine object: son livre can mean either "his book" or "her book"; the masculine son is used because livre is masculine. Similarly, sa maison means either "his house" or "her house" because maison is feminine. Non-possessive pronouns, on the other hand, are usually gender-specific.

Catalan

As in French, Catalan also determines the gender of object but not of the possessor, by possessive pronouns – seu stands for a masculine object, while seva, seua or sa stands for a feminine object.

Portuguese

works with two sets of pronouns. One of them follows the same rules as French and Catalan, with the gender determined by the object ; in the other set, the gender is determined by the possessor as in English, so o livro dele is possessed by a masculine being and o livro dela is possessed by a feminine being. Portuguese can use se and 3rd person plural without subject as in Spanish, to express indefinite/impersonal sense.

Italian

is similar to French, with phrases such as il mio/tuo/suo libro not implying anything about the owner's gender or the owner's name's grammatical gender. In the third person, if the "owner's" sex or category is an issue, it is solved by expressing di lui, di lei for persons or superior animals or di esso for things or inferior animals. Lui portò su le valigie di lei. This rarely happens, though, because it is considered inelegant and the owner's gender can often be inferred from the context, which is anyhow much more important in an Italian environment than in an English-speaking one.

Spanish

In contrast, Spanish possessive pronouns agree with neither the gender of the possessor nor that of the possession, except in the construct with de: de él, de ella. In the third person, the possessive pronoun su is used. Example: Su libro could mean either "his book" or "her book", or even "your book" when speaking politely using the "usted" form of "you", while the informal form of "you" would be "tu libro", with the gender of the possessor being made clear from the context of the statement. Pronouns referring to people in Spanish have gender – él for "him" and ella for "her". Only when referring to an indefinite antecedent is the neuter ello used, and since Spanish is a pronoun dropping language, it usually only appears in prepositional phrases, like para ello, "for it". Grammatical person is inflected in verbs, so subject pronouns are generally used when necessary to make a distinction or add emphasis. For example, the verb vivir may be conjugated in the third person as vive and be a complete sentence on its own. To make a distinction, one might say "Ella vive en Madrid pero él vive en Barcelona" – "She lives in Madrid but he lives in Barcelona". If it is absolutely necessary to provide a subject when referring to an unnamed object, a demonstrative can be used instead of a pronoun: ¿Qué es eso?. An acceptable answer would be Eso es un libro or Eso es una revista, with the genderless eso as subject in both cases.
However, when the pronoun is used as a direct object, gender-specific forms reappear in Spanish. The sentence "I can't find it", when referring to the masculine noun libro would be "No lo encuentro", whereas if the thing being looked for were a magazine then the sentence would be "No la encuentro".
When expressing indefinite/impersonal sense, hence no known gender, there are several ways in Spanish: 3rd person singular se and sometimes uno can express "one"/"you" in the general sense, "No se sabe". Another way is by omitting the pronoun in 3rd person plural to say "they", in the sense of "you" but exclusive "En Francia hablan francés", and 2nd person singular, tú as in "debes creer en ti mismo". In instructions, like cooking recipes, one can see 3rd person plural with se, or 1st person plural.
The Spanish language presents difficulties to gender neutral writing also due to gender agreement for adjectives like bueno and nouns, e.g. for professions panadero, which signal masculine gender and using the other available form would signal exclusively feminine.

Germanic languages

Icelandic

uses a similar system to other Germanic languages in distinguishing three 3rd-person genders in the singular – hann, hún, það. However it also uses this three-way distinction in the plural: þeir, þær, þau. It is therefore possible to be gender-specific in all circumstances should one wish – although of course þau can be used for gender-inclusiveness. Otherwise the form used is determined grammatically. In general statements the use of menn would be preferable as it is less specific than þau.

Norwegian

In Norwegian, a new word was proposed, hin to fill the gap between the third person pronouns hun and han. Hin is very rarely used, and in limited special interest groups; it is not embraced by society as a whole. A reason for the marginal interest in a neuter gender word is the constructed nature of the word, and that the word is homonymous with several older words both in official language and dialectal speech, such as hin and hinsides. One can also use man or en or den. These three are considered impersonal. Amongst LGBT interest groups the use of the word 'hen' after the Swedish implementation in 2010 is now in use.

Swedish

The Swedish language has 4 grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, reale and neutral, which correspond to the 3rd person forms han, hon, den, det. The other forms are gender neutral: singular 1st jag, 2nd du, 3rd indefinite/impersonal man, plural 1st vi, 2nd ni, 3rd de. Neutral is characterised by the definite singular article '-t' whereas the rest end with '-n'. The same distinction applies to the indefinite adjectival singular forms. For people and animals with specified gender the masculine or feminine are used. There is no grammatical way to make gender distinction in plural.
In Swedish, the word hen was introduced generally in the 2000s as a complement to the gender-specific hon and han. It can be used when the gender of a person is not known or when it is not desirable to specify them as either a "she" or "he". The word was proposed by Rolf Dunås in 1966, and could be used occasionally, like in a guideline from the Swedish building council from 1980, authored by Rolf Reimers. Its origin may have been a combination of han and hon.
It was proposed again in 1994, with reference to the Finnish hän, similarly pronounced, a personal pronoun that is gender-neutral, since Finnish completely lacks grammatical gender. In 2009 it was included in Nationalencyklopedin. However, it did not receive widespread recognition until around 2010, when it began to be used in some texts, and provoked some media debates and controversy, but is included since 2015 in Svenska Akademiens ordlista, the most authoritative glossary of the Swedish language, by the Swedish Academy.
Swedish manuals of style treat "hen" as a neologism. Major newspapers like Dagens Nyheter have recommended against its usage, though some journalists still use it. The Swedish Language Council has not issued any general recommendations against the use of hen, but advises against the use of the object form henom ; it instead recommends using hen as both the subject and object form. Hen has two basic usages: as a way to avoid a stated preference to either gender; or as a way of referring to individuals who are transgender, who prefer to identify themselves as belonging to a third gender or who reject the division of male/female gender roles on ideological grounds. Its entry will cover two definitions: as a reference to individual's belonging to an unspecified sex or third gender, or where the sex is not known.
Traditionally, Swedish offers other ways of avoiding using gender-specific pronouns; e.g., "vederbörande" and "man" with its objective form "en" or alternatively "en" as both subjective and objective since "man"/"one" sounds the same as "man"/"male adult" although they are discernible through syntax. "Denna/Denne" may refer to a non-gender-specific referent already or soon-to-be mentioned. One method is rewriting into the plural, as Swedish – like English – has only gender-neutral pronouns in the plural. Another method is writing the pronoun in the referent's grammatical gender ; some nouns retain their traditional pronouns, e.g., "man"/"man" uses "han"/"he", "kvinna"/"woman" uses "hon"/"she", and "människa"/"human being" uses "hon"/"she". While grammatically correct, using "den/det" to refer to human beings may sound as if the speaker regards the referenced human beings as objects.

German

The German language uses 3 genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. These are distinguished only in 3rd person singular, together with indefinite man.
Singular: 1st: ich, 2nd: du, 3rd: er, sie, es, man
Plural: 1st: wir, 2nd: ihr, 3rd: sie,
er is declined as ihn, ihm, seiner, sie as sie, ihr, ihrer and es as es, ihm, seiner.

Other Indo-European languages

Armenian

does not distinguish gender, the word նա meaning both 'he' and 'she'. For inanimate or inhuman words, the demonstratives are used.

Persian

The Persian language has no distinction between animated male and female; "he" and "she" are expressed by the same pronoun u. Singular inanimate as 'it' is referred by an.

Tocharian

Uniquely among Indo-European languages, Tocharian A distinguishes gender in the first person, using näṣ for the male speaker and ñuk for the female speaker.

Welsh

In Welsh, singular personal pronouns are gender-specific. It translates as he or she according to the grammatical gender of the referent noun. However, when it translates an intangible referent, hi is used. The singular possessive pronoun ei is the same word for both men and women, but in some instances it mutates the following word differently depending on whether it means "his" or "her" - the masculine "ei" incurres a soft mutation, while the feminine "ei" mutates either spirantly, or prefixes a "h" in the case of vowels. Gender is inflected through mutation - feminine singular nouns mutate after "y" and cause mutations in words following them. and both cause different mutations following the possessive "ei".
There has been a little use of "hw" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun for use with people, using nasal mutations and the addition of "h" for words beginning with vowels following the possessive "ei".
In most Afro-Asiatic languages only the first-person pronouns are gender-inclusive: second and third person pronouns are gender-specific.

Arabic

In Arabic there are gender distinctions, masculine and feminine,
in the 3rd person, singular
.
In addition, the verbs themselves in present tense, as well as adjectives, have a different form of masculine and feminine.
In Arabic:
"Hi" هي is the 3rd person, singular, feminine.
"Hu" هو is the 3rd person, singular, masculine.

Hebrew

makes a distinction between masculine and feminine in the 2nd and 3rd person singular and plural. The masculine is collective and inclusive, but colloquially the masculine plural forms may be heard as gender-neutral. Hebrew is a pronoun dropping language. Verbs inflect according to gender, number and person in virtually all forms of 2nd and 3rd singular and plural. Though the 1st person pronoun is not gender-specific, the verbs, adjectives, numbers etc. all distinguish whether the speaker is male or female.
First person singularFirst person plural
Non-specific

Austronesian languages

Malay

, both in its Malaysian and Indonesian variants, has no gender pronouns. In addition, nouns referring to gendered family members are gender-neutral. In such cases, a speaker may specify gender by adding the word for 'male' or 'female' to the noun.

Mortlockese

The Lukunosh dialect of Mortlockese has two 3rd person pronouns. The independent forms of the 3rd person singular and plural are /ii/ and /iir/ respectively. These change forms depending on if it is used as a subject proclitic, direct object suffix, or possessive suffix.

Rapa

Old Rapa is the indigenous language of Rapa Iti, an island of French Polynesia located within the Bass Islands archipelago. Old Rapa itself does not have a pronominal system that consists of any gender – specific pronouns. However, similar to many other languages within the Polynesian language family, it contains singular, dual, and plural pronouns. These pronouns of Old Rapa also define the degree of clusivity in the first person dual and the first person plural forms.
In the first person tense – as depicted in the table below – Old Rapa contains pronouns that are exclusive first person singular, however does not contain pronouns that are inclusive first person singular. Old Rapa also consists of pronouns to describe both the exclusive and inclusive first person dual and first person plural forms. By definition, exclusive pronouns are pronouns that include the speaker and one or more others, although does not include the person being addressed. Inclusive pronouns are pronouns that work in the opposite fashion, by including the speaker and the addressee, and potentially more others.
Singular
Singular
DualPlural
First Person Exclusiveoukumāuamātou
First Person Inclusivetāuatātou
Second Personkoekōruakoutou
Third Person'ōna,koianarāuarātou

For both the second and third person tense, Old Rapa contains pronouns that describe second person singular, second person dual, and second person plural. It also consists of unique pronouns for the third person singular, third person dual, and third person plural forms.
When referring to possessive indicators on pronouns, the Old Rapa language adheres closely to the same pronominal system. There exists possessive pronouns for each case: inclusive first person singular, first person dual, and first person plural; exclusive first person singular, first person dual, and first person plural; second person singular, second person dual, and second person plural; and third person singular, third person dual, and third person plural.
The possessive pronouns of Old Rapa are constructed following three morphemes:
"the indefinite article + the possessive marker + pronoun"
However, when spoken, both the indefinite article and possessive markers are put together into what is known as its portmanteau form. As is evident in the following table presenting the Possessive Pronouns of Old Rapa, the all singular, dual, and plural forms adopt the distinction between inalienable objects. When speaking in either the first person singular and third person singular modes, the bond forms of the initial pronouns are used.
tō-ku 'are
INDEF.PossO-1S house
'my house'
tā-na tāne
INDEF.PossA-3S man
'her husband'

Example of First Person Exclusive Singular and Third Person Singular sentence structure.
Example of Second Person Singular
Wuvulu-Aua does not have known gender expression for pronouns. It does distinguish between singular, dual, and plural usage of pronouns. The 3rd person singular uses the same prefix as 1st and 2nd person pronouns, i. Only 1st person pronouns can be inclusive or exclusive. The plural form of pronouns originally referred to a group of three, but eventually changed to refer to three or more.
1st Person2nd Person3rd Person
Singulari-aui-oii-a
Dualʔa-rua
ai-rua 		amu-ruala-rua
Pluralʔo-ʔolu
ai-ʔolu 		amu-ʔoluro-ʔolu

Uralic languages

Finnish

, as other Uralic languages, has no direct nor indirect way to express gender with pronouns. The Finnish hän has inspired the introduction of the Swedish hen pronoun. Finnish is essentially a pronoun dropping language but in the 3rd person singular it is common to use a pronoun explicitly. Hän/he are only used about humans, while se/ne are used about animals, inanimate things, and sometimes about people colloquially.
Singular – 1st person: minä, 2nd: sinä, 3rd: hän/se
Plural – 1st person: me, 2nd: te, 3rd: he/ne
The same basic system also applies to the close relative of Finnish, the Estonian language.
Singular –
1st person:"mina", 2nd: "sina", 3rd: "tema" / for inanimate objects "see"
Plural –
1st person "meie", 2nd person: "teie", 3rd: "nemad" / for inanimate objects "need"
In both languages there are colloquial and literary forms for pronouns. Using a full-length pronoun in colloquial speech can be used to give a pronoun more semantic weight.

Hungarian

does not have gendered pronouns nor any other concept of linguistic gender. The third person singular pronoun for a person is ő.

Other languages

Chinese

has gone in the opposite direction, from non-gendered to gendered pronouns, though this has not affected the spoken language.
In spoken standard Mandarin, there is no gender distinction in personal pronouns: the pronoun tā can mean "he", "she", or "it". However, when the antecedent of the spoken pronoun tā is unclear, native speakers will assume it is a male person. In 1917, the Old Chinese graph tā was borrowed into the written language to specifically represent "she" by Liu Bannong. As a result, the old character tā, which previously also meant "she" in written texts, is sometimes restricted to meaning "he" only. In contrast to most Chinese characters coined to represent specifically male concepts, the character tā is formed with the ungendered character for person rén, rather than the character for male nán."
The creation of gendered pronouns in Chinese was part of the May Fourth Movement to modernize Chinese culture, and specifically an attempt to assert sameness between Chinese and the European languages, which generally have gendered pronouns. Of all the contemporary neologisms from the period, the only ones to remain in common use are tā for objects, tā for animals, and tā for gods. Although Liu and other writers tried to popularize a different pronunciation for the feminine tā, including yi from the Wu dialect and tuo from a literary reading, these efforts failed, and all forms of the pronoun tā retain identical pronunciation. This identical pronunciation of the split characters holds true for not only Mandarin but also many of the varieties of Chinese. As a result some Chinese people mix up the gendered pronouns of European languages in speech. There is a recent trend on the Internet for people to write "TA" in Latin script, derived from the pinyin romanization of Chinese, as a gender-neutral pronoun.
The Cantonese third-person-singular pronoun is keui5, and may refer to people of any gender. For a specifically female pronoun, some writers replace the person radical rén with the female radical nǚ, forming the character keui5. However, this analogous variation to tā is neither widely accepted in standard written Cantonese nor grammatically or semantically required. Moreover, while the character keui5 has no meaning in classical Chinese, the character keui5 has a separate meaning unrelated to its dialectic use in standard or classical Chinese.

Korean

There are no pure gender specific third-person pronouns in Korean. In translation or in creative writing in the modern Korean, the coined term 그녀 "geu-nyeo" is used to refer to a third-person female and 그 "geu" is used to refer to either a male third person or sometimes a neutral gender.

Japanese

Just like Korean, pure personal pronouns used as the anaphor did not exist in traditional Japanese. Most of the time the language drops the pronoun completely or refers to people using their name with a suffix such as the gender-neutral -san added to it.
For example, "She came" would be "斎藤さんが来ました".
In modern Japanese, kare is the male and kanojo the female third-person pronouns. Historically, kare was a word in the demonstrative paradigm, used to point to an object that is physically far but psychologically near. The feminine counterpart kanojo, on the other hand, is a combination of kano and jo, coined for the translation of its Western equivalents. It was not until the Meiji period that kare and kanojo were commonly used as the masculine and feminine pronoun in the same way as their Western equivalents. Although their usage as the Western equivalent pronouns tends to be infrequent—because pronouns tend to be dropped in the first place—kare-shi and kanojo are commonly used today to mean "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" respectively.
First-person pronouns, ore, boku, and watashi, while not explicitly carrying gender, can strongly imply gender based on the inherent levels of politeness or formality as well as hierarchical connotation. While boku and ore are traditionally known to be masculine pronouns and watashi is characterized as feminine, boku is considered to be less masculine than ore and often denotes a softer form of masculinity. To denote a sense of authority, males will tend to resort to ore to display a sense of confidence to their peers.

Turkish

does not have a system of grammatical gender and does not have any gender-specific pronouns. The Turkish singular third-person pronoun o is completely gender-neutral and can be used to refer to masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. The plural third-person pronoun onlar is used the same way.
Turkish is also a null-subject language which means pronouns can usually be dropped while retaining the meaning of the sentence. For example, the sentences "O okuldan geldi." and "Okuldan geldi." both translate to "He/she/it came from school."

Thai

are numerous. Here is only a short list.
First personSecond personThird person
Masculineผม นาย หมอนั่น
Feminineดิฉัน ชั้น นางนั่น
Neuterฉัน เรา คุณ เธอ มัน, เขา, แก, ท่าน

The pronoun เธอ is semi-feminine. It can be used when the speaker or the listener are female. It is seldom used when both parties are male.
The third neuter pronouns are used differently. มัน is often used to refer to inanimate objects and non-human animate beings. However, this pronoun can also be used to refer to people in informal situations. The pronouns เขา, แก, and ท่าน are often used in formal situations – with the latter being the most formal and แก being used to refer to a person older than the speaker.
These three pronouns can also be used to refer to a different grammatical person. เขา can be used in the first person, while แก and ท่าน can be used in the second person.

Constructed languages

Esperanto

Esperanto has no universally accepted gender-neutral pronouns, but there are several proposals. Zamenhof proposed using the pronoun ĝi. Some writers also use other established pronouns like tiu or oni. Still other writers use neologisms such as ri for this purpose.

Ido

Ido has gendered and gender-neutral pronouns in the third person, both singular and plural. The gendered pronouns are:
-il
-el
-ol
The final "u" can be dropped in all of these cases without any change in meaning.
Additionally there is the genderless "lu" which can freely replace any of the above forms if the gender of the referent is ignored, if one wants it to be left ambiguous, or simply because the speaker doesn't want to state it.
All of these pronouns have a plural form, to translate the English "they":
-ili
-eli
-oli, and
-li, which can substitute any of the above under any circumstances, but can also be used if the referents are of mixed genders.
First and second person pronouns are all gender-neutral:
-me
-tu
-vu
-ni
-vi.

Interlingua

Because Interlingua is an Italic constructed language, it shares many traits with Spanish, Italian and French.
Singular: 1st person: io, 2nd: tu, 3rd: ille, illa for humans/animals and illo for objects
Plural: 1st: nos, 2nd: vos, 3rd: illes, illas, illos as plural of above.
Third person singular on is used for indefinite "one"/"you" as in French.

Lingua Franca Nova

has two third person singular pronouns: el, used for humans and animals; lo, used for all else. Los is used for the third person plural, se for third person reflexive, and sua for third person possessives.