Gender-neutrality in genderless languages
Encyclopedia
Gender neutrality
Gender-neutral language
Gender-neutral language, gender-inclusive language, inclusive language, or gender neutrality is linguistic prescriptivism that aims to eliminate reference to gender in terms that describe people...

 in genderless language
Genderless language
A genderless language is a natural or constructed human language that has no category of grammatical gender. Some linguists use the term "noun class" to be a broader categorization which includes the categorization by gender as a special case....

s
is typically achieved by using gender-inclusive words ("human being", "person", "businessperson", and so on) instead of gender-specific ones ("man", "he", "businessman", etc.) when one speaks of people whose gender is unknown, ambiguous, or unimportant. When only a gender-specific word happens to be available, a gender-inclusive neologism may be coined to replace it.

Estonian

Estonian
Estonian language
Estonian is the official language of Estonia, spoken by about 1.1 million people in Estonia and tens of thousands in various émigré communities...

 word ta (or tema) is gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". The suffix -tar or -nna can be added to the end of some words (mostly professions) to make them feminine, although these nouns are in their basic form gender-neutral: laulja (singer), lauljatar (female singer) or lauljanna (female singer); näitleja (actor) - näitlejanna (actress) or näitlejatar (actress). This is rather common. Also, for instance, there are separate words for chairman: esimees (chairman) and esinaine (chairwoman), although the first form is used a lot more often. Most of the professions are gender-neutral: politseinik (policeman or woman), arst (doctor), müüja (salesman or woman), õpetaja (teacher), sõdur (soldier), ehitaja (builder), even lüpsja (milkmaid, male or female). A well-known exception is med. õde (nurse, literally "med[ical] sister").

Some words are clearly masculine or feminine. For example, in Estonian there is no "Motherland", there is only a "Fatherland" (isamaa) and a "Homeland" (kodumaa). There is also only a "mother" (native) tongue (emakeel). A very popular Estonian saying is "Kes ees, see mees" — "The first one is the man".

Finnish

Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...

 has only gender-neutral pronouns and completely lacks grammatical gender. The word hän is gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". The suffix -tar or -tär can be added to some words (mostly professions) to make them feminine if required, for example näyttelijä (actor), näyttelijätär (actress), but these forms are not commonly used any more; using the basic word for both genders (näyttelijä for male and female actors) is the norm. There are also some professions or expressions of which the word mies (man) is an integral part, for example, puhemies, meaning chairman; 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 chairperson of the Finnish Parliament is referred as puhemies irrespective of the actual gender — either herra puhemies (Mr. Chairman) or rouva puhemies (Mrs. or Madame Chairman).

Despite having gender-neutral pronouns, Finnish is similar to most other Western languages in favoring gender-biased adjectives due to social values. As an example, in the first few years after women were permitted to serve as volunteers in the Finnish armed forces, they were required to swear to defend the country in a manly way (miehuullisesti).

Hungarian

Hungarian
Hungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....

 does not have gender-specific pronouns and lacks grammatical gender: referring to a gender needs explicit statement of "the man" (he) or "the woman" (she). The 3rd. person singular pronoun ő means "he/she" and ők means "they". Hungarian does distinguish persons from things, as the latter are referred to as az (it) or azok (those).

However there is a way to distinguish between male and female persons having a certain profession by adding - "woman" to the end of the word: színész-színésznő (actor-actress, lit. "actorwoman") or rendőr-rendőrnő (lit. policeman-policewoman). This though does not work with all the professions as quite many would sound very awkward, like postás meaning "letter carrier", lit. "someone associated with the post", so that there is no such thing as postásnő (mailwoman). This usage has been criticized by Hungarian feminists, as it implies that the normal word or profession is masculine in nature and must only be qualified if a woman is performing it.

Persian

Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

 is a genderless language. For both males and females, the same nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are used. For example,
  • oo (او) is used for both "he" and "she";
  • aan (آن) is used for "it" as in English.


In Persian, the same nouns are used for male and female professionals. For example: baazigar (بازیگر) means both actor and actress. Pish khedmat (پیشخدمت) might mean waiter or waitress. The noun suffix -ash (اَش) serves either as a possessive adjective
Possessive adjective
Possessive adjectives, also known as possessive determiners, are a part of speech that modifies a noun by attributing possession to someone or something...

 or an object pronoun for both males and females as well as things, situations, etc. For example,
ketaabash (کتابش) means "her/his book";
paayash (پایش) means "its/her/his leg";


Oo labash raa boosid (او لبش را بوسید) means "He kissed her lips" or "she kissed his lips" or "he kissed his lips" or "she kissed her lips" or if we consider -ash as an object pronoun we can translate the sentence as "he/she kissed her/him on the lips".

Bengali

In Bengali
Bengali language
Bengali or Bangla is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written with the Bengali script...

, although there are different nouns for professions, but they are not commonly used, so the language has consequently become gender-neutral. In addition, objects, pronouns and almost all adjectives are gender-neutral.

Basque

The Basque language
Basque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...

 is largely gender-free. Most nouns have no gender, though there are different words for males and females in some cases (ama, "mother"; aita, "father"; aita-ama, "father and mother"; guraso, "parent"). Some words take suffixes according to gender (aktore, "actor"; aktoresa, "actress"), but they are rare, and both purist
Purist
A purist is one who desires that an item remains true to its essence and free from adulterating or diluting influences. The term may be used in almost any field, and can be applied either to the self or to others. Use of the term may be either pejorative or complimentary, depending on the context...

s who avoid Romance
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

 influences and the Basque Institute of the Woman recommend against it. For animals, there are particles (oilo, "hen"; oilar, "cock"; hartz eme, "female bear"; hartz arra, "male bear") or different words (behi, "cow"; zezen, "bull").

While there are no gender-specific pronouns, Basque verbs can agree allocutively
Allocutive agreement
In linguistics, allocutive agreement refers to a morphological feature in which the gender of an addressee is marked overtly in an utterance.-Basque:In Basque, allocutive forms are required in the verb forms of a main clause when the speaker uses the familiar pronoun hi "thou"...

 with the gender in the intimate singular second person (this provides no information since the listener already knows his or her gender): hik duk, "you (male) have it"; hik dun, "you (female) 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
T-V distinction
In sociolinguistics, a T–V distinction is a contrast, within one language, between second-person pronouns that are specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee....

 in early modern English. Some Basque dialects already avoid hik as too disrespectful.

Chinese

The Chinese language
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

 or languages/topolects are largely gender-neutral, and possess few linguistic gender marker
Marker (linguistics)
In linguistics, a marker is a free or bound morpheme that indicates the grammatical function of the marked word, phrase, or sentence. In analytic languages and agglutinative languages, markers are generally easily distinguished. In fusional languages and polysynthetic languages, this is often not...

, even though the Chinese society
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

 has historically been shown to have significant degree of male dominance in the social structure as well as education and literature.

Comprehension of written and spoken Chinese is almost wholly dependent on word order
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

, as it has no inflections for gender, tense, or case. There are also very few derivational inflection; 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 (醫生) 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 (male), as in nányīshēng (男醫生). Under normal circumstances both male and female doctors would simply be referred to as yīshēng (醫生).

Spoken Mandarin Chinese also has only one third-person pronoun, for all referents (though -men 們 / 们 can be added as a plural suffix). can mean "he", "she", or "it". However, the different meanings of are written with different characters
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...

: "他", containing the human radical
Radical (Chinese character)
A Chinese radical is a component of a Chinese character. The term may variously refer to the original semantic element of a character, or to any semantic element, or, loosely, to any element whatever its origin or purpose...

 "亻", from "人", meaning person, for he or a person of undetermined gender; "她", containing the feminine radical "女", for "she"; and "它/牠" for "it".

The character for "she", containing the "woman" radical (glyphic element of a character's composition), was invented in the late nineteenth or 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 (likewise there exists a written feminine form for "you", 妳, which is almost never used).

In written Cantonese
Written Cantonese
Cantonese has the most well-developed written form of all Chinese varieties apart from the standard varieties of Mandarin and Classical Chinese. Standard written Chinese is based on Mandarin, but when spoken word for word as Cantonese, it sounds unnatural because its expressions are ungrammatical...

, the third-person singular pronoun is keui5, written as 佢; it may be used to refer to people of either gender. The practice of replacing the "亻" radical with "女" (forming the character 姖) 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.

Japanese

Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 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 using 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, , 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 , which they praise as gender neutral, grammatical and natural-sounding. However, until the Meiji Restoration
Meiji Restoration
The , also known as the Meiji Ishin, Revolution, Reform or Renewal, was a chain of events that restored imperial rule to Japan in 1868...

 in the 19th century, was used for both genders; meant "girlfriend", as it still does.

In general, Japanese, unlike most European languages, has no grammatical gender, although certain words and expressions semantically refer specifically to males or specifically to females (such as haha "mother", bijin "beautiful woman"). However, 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 and , which literally mean "the person inside" and "the master". Japanese custom has also dictated that women be expected to use a polite form of language (keigo) in more situations than men. This expectation has diminished more among urban young female Japanese in the past decade.

The major issues with regarded to gendered language in Japanese are overall speech patterns. There exists a "woman's language" (onna kotoba) . Women's speech has different sentence endings than that of men, especially in non-polite speech. (Polite speech tends to be less differentiated, with male speech becoming more similar to female). 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 (rising intonation) and by dropping the verbs da or desu (meaning "is"). 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 ("money") 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

Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...

, like a few other East Asian languages such as Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

, 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 (person) is named rather than the pronoun. As for job titles, these are not gender-specific. Again, the meaning is normally clear in the context.

Malay

As an Austronesian language, Malay
Malay language
Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...

 is fundamentally gender-neutral. The third-person singular pronoun dia can 'he', 'she' or sometimes 'it', and the object/possessive suffix -nya can mean 'him/his', 'her' or 'it/its'. For example, dia mencintainya means 'he/she loves him/her/it'.

Most nouns that refer to people are also gender-neutral, and need to be qualified when gender is to be expressed. For example, budak means 'child', and is used far more frequently than the gender-specific phrases budak perempuan, 'female child' and so 'girl', and budak lelaki, 'male child' and so 'boy'. Likewise, the words doktor ('doctor'), pelayan ('waiter') 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 engendered (for animals, the adjectives betina and jantan are used instead; a harimau betina is a 'tigress'). 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 (male) or an ustazah (female), and a noble person is either a puteri ('princess') or a putera ('prince'), as used in the legal ethnic classification Bumiputera
Bumiputera
The Bumiputera is derived from the Sanskrit word 'Bhumiputra', which roughly translated means 'sons of the soil'. In both Malaysia and Brunei, the term is used to refer to a member of majority Malay ethnic group...

.

Quechuan

Quechuan languages, spoken in the central Andes
Andes
The Andes is the world's longest continental mountain range. It is a continual range of highlands along the western coast of South America. This range is about long, about to wide , and of an average height of about .Along its length, the Andes is split into several ranges, which are separated...

, are agglutinative
Agglutinative language
An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...

 using only suffixes, but have no gender suffix.

With the exception of mama and tata, and wallpa and k'anka (hen and rooster), no nouns are gender-specific. In Southern Quechuan, qhari (man) and warmi (woman) 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.

Tagalog

Tagalog
Tagalog language
Tagalog is an Austronesian language spoken as a first language by a third of the population of the Philippines and as a second language by most of the rest. It is the first language of the Philippine region IV and of Metro Manila...

, like other Austronesian languages
Austronesian languages
The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia that are spoken by about 386 million people. It is on par with Indo-European, Niger-Congo, Afroasiatic and Uralic as one of the...

, is gender-neutral; pronouns do not even have specific genders.

However, because Tagalog has had over three centuries of Spanish influence, gender is usually differentiated in certain Spanish loanwords by way of the suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...

es -o (masculine) and -a (feminine). These words mostly refer to ethnicities, occupations, and family. Some examples are: Pilipino/Pilipina (Filipino/a), Pinoy/Pinay (nickname for a Filipino person), tindero/tindera (vendor), inhinyero/inhinyera (engineer), tito/tita (uncle/aunt), manong/manang (elder brother/sister), and lolo/lola (grandfather/grandmother).

Dravidian Languages

Dravidian languages
Dravidian languages
The Dravidian language family includes approximately 85 genetically related languages, spoken by about 217 million people. They are mainly spoken in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and...

 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.

Turkish

Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...

 is a gender neutral language, like most other Turkic languages
Turkic languages
The Turkic languages constitute a language family of at least thirty five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples across a vast area from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China, and are considered to be part of the proposed Altaic language family.Turkic languages are spoken...

. Nouns have a generic form and this generic form is used for both males and females. For example, doktor (doctor), eczacı (pharmacist), mühendis (engineer) 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:
O, gece yürümeyi çok seviyor — He/she/it likes to walk at night.
Onu çok seviyorum — I love him/her/it so much.


There are a few exceptions, where it is mandatory to provide gender (because of a word's foreign origin
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...

):
iş + adam + ı = işadamı — business + man = businessman.
iş + kadın + ı = işkadını — business + woman = businesswoman.


Very minor exceptions were constructed from native Turkish words after the 1900s:
bilim + adam + ı = bilim adamı — science + man = male scientist.
bilim + kadın + ı = bilim kadını — science + woman = female scientist.


However, there is an alternative gender neutral use for words like these, which has become more popular in the 2000s:
bilim + insan + ı = bilim insanı — science + person = scientist.


At the same time research have shown a significant presence of semantically-implied genderness (covert gender) 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 (e.g., usage of he/she or male vs. female context, such as police job vs. pregnancy, etc.) it was noticed that feminine gender was marked in 50% of cases, while masculine was marked only in 5% of cases. While translations is not a typical representative of linguistic data, similar asymmetry was also observed in Turkish literary and newspaper texts.

Ido

In Ido
Ido
Ido is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages...

, only two couples of nouns are gender-specific: viro-muliero (man-woman) and patro-matro (father-mother). Other nouns referring to people, and all nouns referring to animals can equally be used to refer to a male or female: doktoro (a doctor), frato (a brother or a sister, i.e.: a sibling), hundo (a dog). And even the two pairs of words above have related nouns that are ambiguous about gender: homo (a human being), adulto (an adult person), genitoro (a parent).

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 (sibling) the words fratino (a sister) and fratulo (a brother) 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. (She is my only sister, implying I may have brothers)
  • El esas mea sola frato. (She is my only sibling)

  • Me ne prizas doktorini. (I don't like female doctors, implying I prefer male doctors)
  • Me ne prizas doktori. (I don't like doctors, male or female)


As for pronouns, they are not gender-specific in the first or second persons, singular and plural. In the third person singular, there are four pronouns (the U between brackets can be used or left out, mostly according to personal choice): il(u) (he), el(u) (she), ol(u) (it, when it refers back to an actual inanimate noun, and not in sentences as "It's raining"), and additionally lu, which can be used instead of any of the other three pronouns, whether it be for stylistic purposes, personal choice, or to refer to an indefinite being (usually human or animal) that can be thought of indifferently as male or female. For example:

Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos doktoro e lu decidez quon me agos
(My head aches. I'll call a doctor, so he/she decides what I'll do)

Since I don't know whether a male or female doctor will come, I cannot use here il(u) or el(u). And I definitely cannot use ol(u) 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 (therefore, knowing whether it will be a man or a woman), I could use any of the following:

1.- Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos mea doktoro ed il decidez quon me agos
(My head aches. I'll call my doctor, so he decides what I'll do)

2.- Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos mea doktoro ed el decidez quon me agos
(My head aches. I'll call my doctor, so she decides what I'll do)

3.- Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos mea doktoro e lu decidez quon me agos
(My head aches. I'll call my doctor, so he/she decides what I'll do)

In sentence number 1, the doctor is a man, so the masculine pronoun is used. In sentence number 2, the doctor is a woman, so the noun is referred back with a feminine pronoun. But in sentence number 3, even though I know if the doctor is a man or a woman, it is perfectly possible to still dodge the definition by using the always available gender-neutral pronoun lu. Notice however that doktoro is never marked for gender in these sentences, since the doctor will be called in his/her professional capacity, and not for being a man or a woman. Actually, saying Me advokos mea doktorino (or mea doktorulo) implies I have a choice between a male and a female doctor, and I have decided on either of them.

In the third person plural, all of these pronouns have a correlative: ili, eli, and oli (only if a group of men, women or inanimate things or concepts respectively is referred). And li if no gender-specificity is required or even possible (for example, if the pronoun refers to a group including both men and women). 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.
("The mothers and their children received the prize they -i.e.: the mothers, not the children- decided", provided that the children are not all girls).

Me pruntis ta libri de mea amiki, e nun me ne povas trovar oli ("I borrowed those books from my friends, and now I can't find them -i.e.: the books, not the friends who are not inanimate beings that can be referred back with oli").

Lingua Franca Nova

Lingua Franca Nova
Lingua Franca Nova
Lingua Franca Nova is an auxiliary constructed language created by Dr. C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. Its vocabulary is based on the Romance languages French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. The grammar is highly reduced and similar to the Romance creoles...

 completely lacks grammatical gender. The word el means "she", "he", and "it". If gender is significant, one may use words such as la fem, la om, la xica, la xico, etc. (the woman, the man, the girl, the boy). In place of "it", one can use words such as la cosa, la idea, esta, acel, etc. (the thing, the idea, this, that).

Terms for various professions are gender neutral, as are terms for animals. If need be, mas o 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. (aunt/uncle, daughter/son, grandmother/grandfather). Only madre/padre and sore/frate (mother/father, sister/brother) use distinct terms.

See also

  • Gender role
    Gender role
    Gender roles refer to the set of social and behavioral norms that are considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific sex in the context of a specific culture, which differ widely between cultures and over time...

  • Gender-neutral language in English
    Gender-neutral language in English
    Gender neutrality in English is a form of linguistic prescriptivism that aims at using a form of English that minimizes assumptions about the gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech.-Rationale:...

  • Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender
    Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender
    Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender implies promoting language usage which is balanced in its treatment of the genders. For example, advocates of gender-neutral language challenge the traditional use of masculine nouns and pronouns when referring to both genders or to a person...

  • Gender-neutral pronoun
    Gender-neutral pronoun
    A gender-neutral pronoun is a pronoun that is not associated with any gender. It designates two distinct grammatical phenomena, the first being pronouns/periphrastics that have been assigned nontraditional meanings in modern times out of a concern for gender equity, and the second being genderless...

  • Grammatical gender
    Grammatical gender
    Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

  • IGALA
    IGALA
    The International Gender and Language Group, or IGALA, is an international interdisciplinary organization that promote research on language, gender, and sexuality. The association was formed in 1999, and developed out of the graduate-student-run Berkeley Women and Language Group...

    (International Gender and Language Group)
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