When a language has gendered pronouns, the use of a particular word as a dummy pronoun may involve the selection of a particular gender, even though there is no noun to agree with. A personal pronoun diagram for Russian and Estonian learning. Erin Crouch lives in Tacoma, Washington and Tallinn, Estonia. Polina Ravlyuk, a Russian blogger who runs an information portal on gender and gender identification, wrote to me in an email: What if you spoke a language that didn’t even have separate words for “him” or “her,” like Estonian? Some languages have a gender-neutral case, such as German es and English it, but these pronouns usually don’t refer to people. Half of millennials in the United States think that gender isn’t limited to male and female, and in the U.S., Facebook offers 56 custom options to select for gender. Generally, French pronouns don’t have a proper gender or number, they inherit from their referent. by Erin Crouch, TALLINN  In French, there is no neutral gender like in some other languages, like German, so every noun has a grammatical gender, including the ones who describe things without a natural gender. Many of the world's languages do not have gender-specific pronouns. It’s not always easy to use gender-neutral language in German, but we’ve compiled a list of ideas of words and phrases that might be useful to you here. “For example, in English, there are multiple nouns that I can use to classify myself (partner, student) without making reference to gender, whereas in German I’m supposed to say the feminine form of many common categories into which I fit, like student (Studentin), and have to explain myself when I refuse.” A young Estonian agender person interviewed for this article who prefers the name Paul does find “tema,” the genderless Estonian pronoun, helpful. Gender-specific and gender-neutral pronouns; Gender-specific and gender-neutral third-person pronouns; I was responsible for the addition of "third-person", so I obviously agree with much of what you say, though I was wondering if I had gone too far, since there is a little information on first- and second-person pronouns in other languages. It makes some things so much easier…one does not need to make assumptions about gender when trying to address someone.” Natural gender languages: English is an example of this kind of language, which doesn’t categorize non-human, non-animal nouns into male or female categories. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi speaks during the first session of the 117th Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 3, 2021. Does Estonian offer a natural home for the nonbinary? Agender people have the hardest time expressing their identity in highly gendered languages, but genderless languages are not the utopia one may imagine. Sign up to join this community. In the same survey, transgender French respondent #171 was clear and succinct: A table, for instance, is a feminine noun in French— “She is a lovely table!”—while a tree is a masculine noun in German. Men are the standard and everything else is the exception. In English when I use ‘they’ to refer to a person, most people don’t notice it. Gender in European languages. These terms are undoubtedly beneficial, helping to allow for expression of gender fluidity. English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. In English, these terms include they as a singular, ze/zir or zie/zir, ze/hir or other variations, and Mx. To put it simply, choosing the right pronoun is a big deal. Some languages without noun class may have noun classifiers instead. This page was last edited on 12 January 2021, at 05:18. All rights reserved, Between Two Shores: A Visual Love Letter to the Curonian Spit, An Eccentric Cold War Education: Revisiting the Lithuanian Gymnasium in Germany, Fiction: Saulius Šaltenis – Diary of a Jewish Girl, Searching for Nikolajs Hercbergs: the Mystery Man Who Photographed Riga, Sillamäe: Inside a Former Soviet Secret City in Estonia, [S]peaking a gendered language as an agender person fuckin’ sucks, one can use female or other pronouns or nouns. We’re always open to additions, corrections and newly coined words! It only takes a minute to sign up. By . Introduction. I prefer ‘they’ or ‘he’ in English, but I don’t usually say it to people unless they ask. But that’s maybe because the people I talk to in English are not native speakers. Depending on the context, there are several solutions with more or fewer labels. requesting ‘he’ instead of ‘she’). Others, meanwhile, have genders for nearly everything, even objects. A table and tree are it, and only people are he or she. Lily’s book … New reforms promote inclusion and diversity. Asexual Finnish student Kati agrees, saying, “I’m so happy Finnish has only one [ungendered] pronoun. Would you care less about the pronouns for yourself? Key words: gender, gender-specific pronouns, gender-neutral pronouns, language, social identity. Tosha, a young Russian who identifies as agender, told me: I’m constantly misgendered, or I’m misgendering myself in order to be understood.” But you know what’s interesting? Pronomen. The document signed by the academy’s 40 members — only five of whom are women — de… If I can say in my language, “She (or ze) is the CEO,” I can draw attention to the fact that the term CEO is a false generic. Gender Across Languages Volume 4, published in 2015, notes the appearance of the term tema-ke or ‘little him/her,’ in use in newspapers and online to force a feminine aspect; the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her, for example, is called Temake in Estonian. And also,, i am fully aware that there are nouns that correspond to gender in english (but that change accordingly) such as blond/blonde, waiter/waitress, bachlor/bachlorette, etc. In Estonian there is no gender in pronouns, but there are marker words like ‘tüdruk’ (girl), ‘preili’ (Ms.), or ‘neiu’ (a young woman) that I don’t identify with, but which are used by older people addressing me. In my own family, it’s been difficult for most of them, though my friends, mother, and grandmother easily adjusted to using masculine pronouns to refer to me. And notably, English as a language is mostly without grammatical gender). On November 2017, France was caught in the middle of a heated debate over the future of its own language. So people would default to ‘she’, which was unbearable to me. Tosha also notes that there’s the option to use a plural pronoun when referring to agender people. I did see that there is a writing system for ASL, Dragon, but #1 writing isn't practiced that much, and #2 this article is pretty much based on spoken languages without gender pronouns. Plural or ‘neuter’ cases in Russian aren’t comfortable for me. It’s worth noting that the issue isn’t widely discussed [yet] in Russia, because in my opinion society isn’t ready to accept gender on a spectrum. Language and Power in Politics: A Gender Stereotype Game; Using Language to Examine Power and Gender Gradients Between YouTube’s Influencers; Man Up! Without my clarification, most people will picture a male CEO. All rights reserved. Some languages of the world (including most Austronesian languages, many East Asian languages, the Quechuan languages, and the Uralic languages [7]) 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 (or noun classes), but … Anybody can ask a question Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up and rise to the top Home Questions Tags Users Unanswered What is the possessive pronoun for a person whose gender we … Anagha Srikanth | Jan. 4, 2021. It might be helpful to demonstrate how to execute gender pronoun nullification. If I can’t use she or ze, this kind of sexist/gendered assumption can be even more difficult to notice and correct. A gender neutral or gender inclusive pronoun is a pronoun which does not associate a gender with the individual who is being discussed. “I planted him in the forest, where he will grow very tall!” Women in American Sitcoms; I Hate to Interrupt, but… Examining Interruptions, Face-Threatening Acts, and Banter in Mixed-Sex Two-Person Conversational Style Sports Interviews [In] German I struggle a lot with language and [I am] often very unhappy with the situation of [the lack of] German gender-neutral language. If it seems like English-speakers are dissatisfied, the situation for speakers of gendered languages—which stipulate strict gender distinctions for both humans and objects—is far worse. Even without considering the exclusionary effects of these strategies, they were the worst of the four, anyways. “I think after some time I’ll be able to do the same for myself [in Russian].”, It’s clear that, not surprisingly, natural gender and gendered languages pose problems for identity expression. Jan Bułhak – the Man Who Captured Turn-of-the-Century Vilnius, Photographic Notes on Latvia's Capital – Ģirts Raģelis, Copyright © 2021 Deep Baltic. Scroll down for English version (in progress!) You want to make it as simple as you can, so you don’t overwhelm users with options. I lack usable and easy to learn/apply pronouns and descriptions of myself. Faced with that level of discrimination, the use of pronouns can seem far down the list of priorities. in written forms. Were we able to go back in time over a hundred years and ask casual people in the streets about gender, we would notice that their answers would pertain to a grammatical category rather than a social phenomenon. Many Australian languages have a system of gender superclassing in which membership in one gender can mean membership in another. The bottom-left corner shows the genderless third-person pronoun tema, which means “he” or “she”. For example, the word lakimies (literally lawman or lawyer) in Finnish is what is called a false generic. but at least in English, one can use female or other pronouns or nouns to, as the book Gender Across Languages put it,  “emphasize women’s [or other’s] presence in the world.” In a language that can’t grammatically distinguish between he, she, and ze, androcentricity—or male bias—can be even more insidious. One participant wrote: It might be confusing, she says, but many languages don't have gender pronouns at all. These are typically borrowed words like кафе (cafe) that do not take a masculine or feminine case. To start looking at the effects of language spoken on pronoun preferences, it’s important to understand grammatical gender, a method of categorizing nouns in a language, typically as masculine, feminine, or neuter. And some Republicans are predictably, ignorantly, unnecessarily mad about it. Half of millennials in the United States think that gender isn’t limited to male and female, and in the U.S., Facebook offers 56 custom options to select for gender. use “he/his” when referring to a generic individual in the third person. Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, 1996. p.437, http://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/105/Esperanto16.pdf, Biak: Description of an Austronesian Language of Papua, https://web.archive.org/web/20070904225112/http://www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/StaffPages/aikhenvald%2Bdownloads/ClassifiersELL2published.pdf, https://scholar.harvard.edu/mpolinsky/files/Dyirbal.pdf, https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_11037/rpopt.pdf?Expires=1495704752&Signature=f5dJsIP1bJ4D3ICf4UTKiBehPDgx4Q8AUj~SIe4tL1-2n-fkAHl7fKtYDxYQ918mu0UUKM9OfGxw~DC3I-T~QRiGWHUhtl~RnJ4hH5TZNFO7RFouVpXeaBlRRd1fT0t8I7sTswoT9qjwZ3zqV3O-fGfOHUoblz4Aayl7U5IsPGK6sXpacpkketqOf~bXayFbg9C~kj~QJkm-naqsAdVeQkngzUw1~hymGbd2rNcVnGXxeq4g6S04aoF2idHVfE8JAlJ1ov6~MG83dp6BhqtRRzCxV396TyyUjc4AdHqUZrsvchvpYnjPBqNH5MKMfKD8CKGDG7Fgtf9fBgTAiBz2qg__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJKNBJ4MJBJNC6NLQ, https://www.africa.upenn.edu/NEH/rwlanguage.htm, "The Augment in Kirundi: When Syntax Meets Phonology", https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324224169_The_Ha_Language_of_Tanzania_Grammar_Texts_and_Vocabulary, "Difficult Languages: Tongue Twisters - In search of the world's hardest language", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders&oldid=999834645, Articles with unsourced statements from February 2019, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. In Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, authors Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman emphasize the politics of language itself and of having “the agency to have our own words and definitions of them, and insist upon them to linguistic passers-by.” A natural gender language with a history of borrowed words, like English, has the flexibility to create pronouns to suit how a person feels inside. Some languages that do have gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a 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, … Gender neutrality and gender nullification lead to cleaner, more elegant sentences. 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