A third-person pronoun is a
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...
that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener.
[ Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a ]grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
system, a system of agreement Agreement may refer to:
Agreements between people and organizations
* Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law
* Trade agreement, between countries
* Consensus, a decision-making process
* Contract, enforceable in a court of law
** Meeting ...
where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gr ...
, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam
Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry ( Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam wa ...
, Tamil
Tamil may refer to:
* Tamils, an ethnic group native to India and some other parts of Asia
** Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka also called ilankai tamils
**Tamil Malaysians, Tamil people native to Malaysia
* Tamil language, na ...
, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to " natural gender", which is often based on biological gender. Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender.
In languages with pronominal gender, problems of usage may arise in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown social gender is being referred to but commonly available pronouns are gender-specific. Different solutions to this issue have been proposed and used in various languages.
Overview of grammar patterns in languages
No gender distinctions in personal pronouns
Many languages of the world (including most Austronesian languages, many East Asian languages
The East Asian languages are a language family (alternatively ''macrofamily'' or ''superphylum'') proposed by Stanley Starosta in 2001. The proposal has since been adopted by George van Driem.
Classifications Early proposals
Early proposals of s ...
, the Quechuan languages
Quechua (, ; ), usually called ("people's language") in Quechuan languages, is an indigenous language family spoken by the Quechua peoples, primarily living in the Peruvian Andes. Derived from a common ancestral language, it is the most widel ...
, and the Uralic languages
The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian ...
[Siewierska, Anna; ''Gender Distinctions in Independent Personal Pronouns''; in Haspelmath, Martin; Dryer, Matthew S.; Gil, David; Comrie, Bernard (eds.) ''The World Atlas of Language Structures'', pp. 182–185. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ]) do not have gender distinctions in personal pronouns, just as most of them lack any system of grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
. In others, such as many of the Niger–Congo languages
Niger–Congo is a hypothetical language family spoken over the majority of sub-Saharan Africa. It unites the Mande languages, the Atlantic-Congo languages (which share a characteristic noun class system), and possibly several smaller groups of ...
, there is a system of grammatical gender (or noun classes), but the divisions are not based on sex. In Swahili, for example, the independent third person pronoun ''yeye'' 'he/she' can be used to refer to a male or female being. What matters in this case is that the referent belongs to the animate class (i.e humans or non-human animals) as opposed to an inanimate class. Since pronouns do not distinguish the social gender of the referent, they are considered neutral in this kind of system.
Grammatical gender
In other languages – including most Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...
and Afro-Asiatic
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic s ...
languages – third-person personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
s (at least those used to refer to people) 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.
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 Agreement may refer to:
Agreements between people and organizations
* Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law
* Trade agreement, between countries
* Consensus, a decision-making process
* Contract, enforceable in a court of law
** Meeting ...
. Thus in French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
, for example, the first- and second-person personal pronouns may behave as either masculine or feminine depending on the sex of the referent
A referent () is a person or thing to which a name – a linguistic expression or other symbol – refers. For example, in the sentence ''Mary saw me'', the referent of the word ''Mary'' is the particular person called Mary who is being spoken o ...
; and indefinite pronoun
An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun which does not have a specific familiar referent. Indefinite pronouns are in contrast to definite pronouns.
Indefinite pronouns can represent either count nouns or noncount nouns. They often have related form ...
s such as ('someone') and ('no one') are treated conventionally as masculine, even though as a noun ('person') is only feminine regardless of the sex of the referent. (See .) There are both direct and indirect options for nonbinary referents, although the use of some forms is contested.
Example of agreement in a language with grammatical gender
(1) ''Les tomates, elles sont encore vertes.'' Formal French
'The tomatoes, they are still green.' FP,
(Lambrecht 1981:40, cited by Gelderen, 2022, p. 33)
(2) ''C'est que chacun, il a sa manière de.''... Swiss spoken French
It.is that everyone 3.S has his way of
'Everyone has his own way of....'
(Fronseca-Greber 2000:338, cited by Gelderen, 2022, p. 33)
Gender distinctions only in third-person pronouns
A grammatical gender system can erode as observed in languages such as Odia (formerly Oriya), English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
and Persian. In English, a general system of noun gender has been lost, but gender distinctions are preserved in the third-person singular pronouns. This means that the relation between pronouns and nouns is no longer syntactically motivated in the system at large. Instead, the choice of anaphoric pronouns is controlled by referential gender or social gender.
Example of agreement in English
(3) ''Mary''i ''described Bill''j ''to herself''i''.''
(4) ''John''j ''came in and he''j ''was wearing a hat.''
Issues concerning gender and pronoun usage
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 (for plurals) mixed. In English and many other languages, the masculine form has sometimes served as the default or unmarked
In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...
form; that is, masculine pronouns have been used in cases where the referent or referents are not known to be (all) female. This collective masculine is also the case in ancient languages, like Classical Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...
and Biblical Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew (, or , ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite branch of Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of t ...
and have influenced the modern forms. This leads to sentences such as (5a) in English, and (6a) in French.
Example of gender-neutral masculine: English
(5) a. ''If anybody comes, tell him.'' masculine ''him'' used to refer to a person of unknown sex
b. *''If anybody comes, tell her.'' feminine ''her'' is not used to refer to a person of unknown sex
Example of collective masculine: French
(6) a. Vos amis sont arrivés — Ils étaient en avance.
'Your friends have arrived - they were early.'
Note: plural masculine ''ils'' used if group has men and women
b. Vos amies sont arrivées — Elles étaient en avance.
'Your friendsFEM have arrivedFEM - theyFEM were early.'
Note: plural feminine ''elles'' used if group has only women;
noun is feminine (''amies''), as is past participle (''arrivées'')
As early as 1795, dissatisfaction with the convention of the collective masculine 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.
Gender-neutral pronouns in modern standard English
The English language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...
has gender-specific personal pronouns in the third-person
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
singular. The masculine pronoun is '' he'' (with the related forms ''him'', ''his'' and ''himself''); the feminine is ''she
She most commonly refers to:
*She (pronoun), the third person singular, feminine, nominative case pronoun in modern English.
She or S.H.E. may also refer to:
Literature and films
*'' She: A History of Adventure'', an 1887 novel by H. Rider Hagga ...
'' (with the related forms ''her'', ''hers'' and ''herself''); the neuter is ''it'' (with the related forms ''its'' and ''itself''). The third-person plural ''they'' (and its related forms ''them'', ''their'', ''themselves'') are gender-neutral and can also be used to refer singular, personal antecedents, as in (7).
(7) ''Where a recipient of an allowance under section 4 absents themself from Canada,''
''payment of the allowance shall'' ...
Generally speaking, ''he'' refers to males, and ''she'' refers to females. When a person has adopted a persona of a different gender (such as when acting
Acting is an activity in which a story is told by means of its enactment by an actor or actress who adopts a character—in theatre, television, film, radio, or any other medium that makes use of the mimetic mode.
Acting involves a broad r ...
or performing in drag), pronouns with the gender of the persona are used. In gay slang
LGBT slang, LGBT speak, or gay slang is a set of English slang lexicon used predominantly among LGBT people. It has been used in various languages since the early 20th century as a means by which members of the LGBT community identify themselves ...
, the gender of pronouns is sometimes reversed ( gender transposition).
''He'' and ''she'' are normally used for humans; use of ''it'' can be dehumanizing, and, more importantly, implies a lack of gender even if one is present, and is usually, thus, inappropriate. ''It'' is sometimes used to refer to a baby or a child in a generic sense as in response to the question ''What is it?'' when a baby has been born: ''-It's a girl/boy''. However, when talking to parents of intersex babies, some doctors are advised to use ''your baby'' instead. ''It'' is often used for non-human animals of unknown gender, despite being inaccurate, but ''he'' or ''she'' is frequently used for a non-human animal with a known gender. ''He'' or ''she'' are also for a non-human animal who is referred to by a proper name, as in (8) where ''Fido'' is understood to be the name of a dog. At least one grammar states that "he" or "she" is obligatory for animals referred to by a proper name
A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa'', ''Jupiter'', ''Sarah'', ''Microsoft)'' as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, ...
.
(8) ''Fido adores his blanket''.
The other English pronouns (the first- and second-person personal pronouns ''I'', ''we'', ''you'', etc.; the third-person plural personal pronoun ''they''; the indefinite pronouns ''one'', ''someone'', ''anyone'', etc.; and others) do not make male–female gender distinctions; that is, they are gender-neutral. The only distinction made is between personal and non-personal reference (''someone'' vs. ''something'', ''anyone'' vs. ''anything'', ''who'' vs. ''what'', ''whoever'' vs. ''whatever'', etc.).
''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 (like a personal car). Animate objects like robot
A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be ...
s and voice assistant
An intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) or intelligent personal assistant (IPA) is a software agent that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on commands or questions. The term "chatbot" is sometimes used to refer to virtual ...
s are often assumed to have a gender and sometimes have a name with a matching gender. (See .)
For people who are transgender
A transgender (often abbreviated as trans) person is someone whose gender identity or gender expression does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth. Many transgender people experience dysphoria, which they seek to alleviate through ...
, 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.
For English, 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 is a non-binary gender identity; various alternatives are described in the following sections.
Singular ''they'' as a gender-neutral pronoun
Since at least the 14th century, ''they'' (including related forms such as ''them'', ''their'', ''theirs'', ''themselves'', and ''themself'') has been used with a plural verb form to refer to a singular antecedent. This usage is known as the singular they
Singular ''they'', along with its inflected or derivative forms, ''them'', ''their'', ''theirs'' and ''themselves'' (or ''themself''), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an unspecified antecedent, in sentenc ...
, as it is equivalent to the corresponding singular form of the pronoun.
(9) ''There's not a man I meet but doth salute me''
''As if I were their well-acquainted frie''nd
(William Shakespeare, A Comedy of Errors, 1623)
instead of: ''As if I were his well-acquainted frie''nd
(10) ''Every fool can do as they're bid.''
(Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation, 1738)
instead of: ''Every fool can do as he's bid''.
(11) ''Both sisters were uncomfortable enough.''
''Each felt for the other, and of course for themselves''.
(Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813)''''
instead of: ''Each felt for ''''the other, and of course for herself''.''
Prescription against singular ''they'' has historically impacted more formal registers of writing. Conversely, to the present day, singular ''they'' continues to be attested in both speech and less formal registers of writing in British and American English. Recent corpus data suggest that English dialects in Hong Kong, India, and Singapore use this epicene less than British English. The ''Cambridge Grammar of the English Language'' and the ''Merriam-Webster Dictionary'' include the following examples among the possible uses of singular ''they'', which they note is not universally adopted by all speakers.
(12) ''Anyone who arrives at the door can let themself in using this key.''
(13) ''I knew certain things about ... the person I was interviewing...''
''They'' ''had adopted their gender-neutral name a few years ago,''
''when they began to consciously identify as nonbinary...''
(Amy Harmon)
While many speakers recognize the need for gender neutral pronouns, they nevertheless deem referential singular ''they,'' as in (13), ungrammatical or unfit for the job due to the ambiguity it can create in certain contexts. New pronouns
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...
such as ''ve'' (used in Science Fiction) and ''ze/hir'' have been proposed in order to avoid the perceived limitations of singular ''they''. Currently, these new pronouns are only used by a small percentage of speakers while singular ''they'' remains the most widely selected option.
Antecedents for singular ''they''
Generally speaking, there are three kinds of antecedents with which the singular ''they'' can be used.
* In (14), singular ''they'' occurs with a quantified singular antecedent or a singular antecedent of unknown gender.
* In (15), singular ''they'' occurs with a singular antecedent known to be nonbinary or ungendered.
* In (16), singular ''they'' occurs with a singular antecedent of any gender, with no restriction on description or name.
In examples (14-16), subscripti indicates coreference
In linguistics, coreference, sometimes written co-reference, occurs when two or more expressions refer to the same person or thing; they have the same referent. For example, in ''Bill said Alice would arrive soon, and she did'', the words ''Alice'' ...
; moreover, examples such as (15) and (16) are sometimes referred to as 'referential they'.
(14) a. Anyonei who thinks theyi need more time should ask for an extension.
b. The personi at the door left before I could see who theyi were.
(15) a. Kellyi said theyi were leaving early.
b. The strongest studenti will present theiri paper next.
(16) a. Mariai wants to send theiri students on the field trip.
b. We heard from Arthuri that theyi needed time to think about the idea.
c. We asked he first girl in linesub>i to introduce themself/themselvesi.
d. Your brotheri called to say theyi would be late.
Speaker variation
In the twenty-first century, syntactic research differentiates three groups of English speakers can be identified, based on their judgments about pronoun usage for (14), (15) and (16).
* Group A speakers judge only (14) to be acceptable. Such speakers reject "referential" singular when they know the referent's binary gender, which is taken to indicate that gender features are contrastive in their lexicons
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or for wo ...
. For this group of speakers, usage of singular ''they'' in (14) is acceptable to because the quantified antecedent ''anyone'' and the definite description ''the person'' lack a gender specification.
* Group B speakers judge both (14) and (15) to be acceptable. For these speakers, gender is thought to still be contrastive in their lexicons
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or for wo ...
; however, they have created special entries for individuals that use the singular ''they'' pronoun.
* Group C speakers judge (14), (15) and (16) to be acceptable. It has been proposed that gender is losing its featural contrast in these speakers' lexicons
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or for wo ...
.
A recent study by Kirby Conrod found these speaker groups to be correlated with age and gender identity. Relative to age, participants of all ages accepted the usage in (14), whereas younger participants rated usage of referential ''they'' in (15) and (16) higher than did their older counterparts. Relative to gender identity, non-binary and transgender participants rated referential ''they'' higher than did cisgender
Cisgender (often shortened to cis; sometimes cissexual) is a term used to describe a person whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth. The word ''cisgender'' is the antonym of '' transgender''. The prefix '' cis-'' is L ...
participants. Elsewhere, cisgender speakers with at least one trans or non-binary family member have also been found to rate all three cases as acceptable. Another study found a correlation between resistance to the second and third uses and prescriptivist attitudes about language.
Work by Keir Moulton and colleagues, published in 2020, has also found that the presence of a linguistic antecedent — which is the case for examples (14), (15), and (16) — significantly improves the acceptability judgments of singular ''they''. In sentences with a linguistic antecedent, such as (17a), the use of singular ''they'' is judged to be equally acceptable whether or not the hearer knows the (binary) gender of the referent. In sentences where singular ''they'' is purely deictic and has no linguistic antecedent, such as (17b), the use of singular ''they'' is judged to be less acceptable than the use of a singular gendered pronoun (such as he or she) when the hearer knows the referent's (binary) gender. The authors suggest that the use of a gender-neutral antecedent (e.g. server or reporter) may signal the irrelevance of gender in the discourse context, making singular ''they'' more acceptable. Additionally, having a linguististic antecedent clarified that the speaker was referring to a singular antecedent, rather than a plural one. In the deictic case, without a linguistic antecedent, these signals were not overt, and the speakers' judgment depended more on their experience with the pronoun itself.
Type of antecedent affects acceptability of singular ''their'' (subscript i denotes coreference
In linguistics, coreference, sometimes written co-reference, occurs when two or more expressions refer to the same person or thing; they have the same referent. For example, in ''Bill said Alice would arrive soon, and she did'', the words ''Alice'' ...
)''''
(17) a. ''The reporter''i ''said that their''i ''cellphone was recording the whole interview''.
Note: judged as more acceptable
b. ''They''i ''said that their''i ''cellphone was recording the whole interview''.
Note: judged as less acceptable
Another study found an effect of social distance on speaker judgments of singular they use. Usage was judged to be more acceptable when the speaker was not personally close with the referent, compared to use for referents with whom the speaker was personally close. The authors suggested that, in the former case, the referent's gender may be less likely to be known or relevant.
Reference to males and females
Generic ''he''
Forms of the pronoun ''he'' were used for both males and females during the Middle English and Modern English periods. Susanne Wagner observes that: "There was rather an extended period of time in the history of the English language when the choice of a supposedly masculine personal pronoun (''him'') 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 usage continues to this day:
(18) a. ''The customer brought his purchases to the cashier for checkout.''
b. ''In a supermarket, a customer can buy anything he needs.''
c. ''When a customer argues, always agree with him.''
This may be compared to usage of the word ''man'' for humans in general (although that was the original sense of the word "man" in the Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...
, much as the Latin word for "human in general", ''homo'', came to mean "male human"—which was ''vir'', in Latin—in most of the Romance languages).
(19) a. ''All men are created equal.''
b. ''Man'' ''cannot live by bread alone.''
The use, in formal English, of ''he'', ''him'' or ''his'' as a gender-neutral pronoun has traditionally been considered grammatically correct. For example, William Safire
William Lewis Safire (; Safir; December 17, 1929 – September 27, 2009Safire, William (1986). ''Take My Word for It: More on Language.'' Times Books. . p. 185.) was an American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He ...
in his ''On Language'' column in ''The New York Times'' approved of the use of generic ''he'', mentioning the mnemonic phrase "the male embraces the female". A reader replied with an example of use of the purportedly gender-neutral ''he'', as in (20). Such examples point to the fact indiscriminate use of generic ''he'' leads to non-sensical violations of semantic gender agreement.
(20) "''The average American needs the small routines of getting ready for work.''
''As he shaves or blow-dries his hair or pulls on his panty-hose,''
''he is easing himself by small stages into the demands of the day.''"
(C. , ''The New York Times'' (1985); as quoted by Miller and Swift.)
The use of generic ''he'' has increasingly been a source of controversy, as it can be perceived as reflecting a positive bias towards men and a male-centric society, and a negative bias against women. In some contexts, the use of ''he'', ''him'' or ''his'' as a gender-neutral pronoun may give a jarring or ridiculous impression:
(21) a. "''... everyone will be able to decide for himself whether or not to have an abortion.''"
(Albert Bleumenthal, N.Y. State Assembly (cited in Longman 1984,
as quoted in ''Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage''
b. "''... the ideal that every boy and girl should be so equipped''
''that he shall not be handicapped in his struggle for social progress''..''."''
(C. C. Fries, American English Grammar (1940) quoted in ''Reader's Digest
''Reader's Digest'' is an American general-interest family magazine, published ten times a year. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, it is now headquartered in midtown Manhattan. The magazine was founded in 1922 by DeWitt Wallace and his wif ...
'' 1983;
as cited in ''Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage''
c. "''... She and Louis had a game—who could find the ugliest photograph of himself.''"
(Joseph P. Lash, ''Eleanor and Franklin'' (1971), quoted in ''Reader's Digest'' 1983;
as cited in ''Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage'')
The use of generic ''he'' has also been seen as prejudicial by some, as in the following cases:
* The Massachusetts Medical Society effectively blocked membership of female physicians on the grounds that the society's by-laws used the pronoun ''he'' when referring to members.
* The Persons Case
''Edwards v Canada (AG)''also known as the ''Persons Case'' (french: l'Affaire « personne »)is a famous Canadian constitutional case that decided in 1929 that women were eligible to sit in the Senate of Canada. The legal case was put forward b ...
, the legal battle over whether Canadian
Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...
women counted as legal persons eligible to sit in the Senate
A senate is a deliberative assembly, often the upper house or chamber of a bicameral legislature. The name comes from the ancient Roman Senate (Latin: ''Senatus''), so-called as an assembly of the senior (Latin: ''senex'' meaning "the el ...
, partially turned on use of "he" to refer to a (generic) person qualified to be a senator.
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". The same would apply to the generic ''she'', bringing a female image to mind. ''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:
(22) a. ''A secretary should keep her temper in check.''
b. ''A nurse must always be kind to her patients.''
The 19th and 20th centuries saw an upsurge in consciousness and advocacy of gender equality
Gender equality, also known as sexual equality or equality of the sexes, is the state of equal ease of access to resources and opportunities regardless of gender, including economic participation and decision-making; and the state of valuing d ...
, and this has led in particular to advocacy for gender-neutral language
Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids bias towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases in a c ...
. In this context, the usage of generic ''he'' has declined in favor of other alternatives.
''He or she'', ''(s)he''
To disambiguate contexts where a referent encompasses both males and females, periphrasis
In linguistics, periphrasis () is the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed by attaching an affix or clitic to a word. The resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one infl ...
is used. Though cumbersome, this solution is attested with the full range of English pronouns, include the subject pronouns ''he or she'' (23), the object pronouns ''him or her'' (24), the possessive pronoun ''his or hers'' (25), and the reflective pronouns ''himself or herself'' (26). In writing, these periphrastic forms are sometimes abbreviated to ''he/she'', ''(s)he'', ''s/he'', ''him/her'', ''his/her'', ''himself/herself'', ''hers/his'', but are not easily abbreviated in verbal communication. With the exception of ''(s)he'' and ''s/he'', a writer does in principle have the choice of which pronoun to place first. However, usage indicates that the masculine pronouns is most often mentioned first.
(23) a. ''If any employee needs to take time off,''
''s/he should contact the Personnel Department''.
b. ''Talk to your doctor and see if s/he knows of any local groups.''
c. ''Each employee must sign the register when she/he enters or leaves''.
d. ''Read to children and let them participate from time to time by telling them what''
''they think the author would add if she or he was present with them''.''''
(24) a. ''How often do you perform small acts of kindness for your partner''
(''like making him or her coffee in the mornin''g)?.
b. ''Clearly, no one in the entire United States simply meets someone,''
''talks with him or her a while, and falls in love any more.''
(25) a. ''We must fight the tradition that forces the actor to accept poverty''
''as a precondition of his or her profession''.
b. nsert example
(26) a. ''...at the collegiate level the student must advocate for himself or herself.''
b. ''...no student, of any background, should be expected at the outset''
''to recognize him or herself in it''.
c. ''Everyone will improve him/herself in his/her area''...
Some observers, such as the linguist James McCawley, suggest that the use of periphrastic forms may promote stereotypes: "''he and she'' an foster
An, AN, aN, or an may refer to:
Businesses and organizations
* Airlinair (IATA airline code AN)
* Alleanza Nazionale, a former political party in Italy
* AnimeNEXT, an annual anime convention located in New Jersey
* Anime North, a Canadian an ...
the standard sexual stereotypes n thatif you say ''he or she'', you imply that women aren't included unless they are specifically mentioned, and you make it easier to talk about cases where only one sex is included than where both are."
Alternation of ''she'' and ''he''
Authors sometimes employ rubrics for selecting ''she'' or ''he'' such as:
* Use the gender of the primary author.
* Alternate between "she" and "he".
* Alternate by paragraph or chapter.
* Use ''he'' and ''she'' to make distinctions between two groups of people.
''It'' as a gender-neutral pronoun
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
had grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
, and thus commonly used "it" for people, even where they were clearly male or female:
* (meaning 'child') had grammatical neuter gender, as are compound words formed from it, e.g. 'male-child' and 'female-child'. All three were pronominalized by the neuter pronoun ''it'' ().
* (meaning "female", modern "wife
A wife (plural, : wives) is a female in a marital relationship. A woman who has separated from her partner continues to be a wife until the marriage is legally Dissolution (law), dissolved with a divorce judgement. On the death of her partner, ...
") had grammatical neuter gender, and so were pronominalized by the neuter pronoun ''it'' "it". When ''wif'' was the non-head member of a compound — as with 'female-person', modern 'woman' — the gender of the compound was determined by the head of the copound, in this case man, which had grammatical masculine gender, and so was pronominalized by the masculine pronoun ''he''.
Over time, English gradually developed a system of natural gender (gender based on semantic meaning) which now holds sway in Modern English.
For human children
For more on usage of ''it'', see It (pronoun)#Semantics.
In Modern English, pronouns referring to adult humans are typically gendered: feminine ''she'', masculine ''he''. However, in some contexts, children may be referred to with the gender-neutral pronoun ''it''. When not referring specifically to children, ''it'' is not generally applied to people, even in cases where their gender is unknown.
The 1985 edition of the Quirk et al. grammar observes that whereas ''he'' and ''she'' are used for entities treated as people (including anthropomorphized
Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology.
Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics t ...
entities), the pronoun ''it'' is normally used for entities not regarded as persons. But the pronoun ''it'' can 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 such as (26). And, according to ''The Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing'' (1995), ''it'' is sometimes the "obvious" choice for children. Examples given include (27a), and the more colloquial (27b). ''It'' may even be used when the child's sex is known: In the passage given in (27c), 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.
(27) a. A child learns to speak the language of its environment.
(Quirk et al., A comprehensive grammar of the English language (1985), p. 316–317, 342)
b. To society, a baby's sex is second in importance to its health.
(Miller & Swift, The Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing (1995), p. 58)
c. "He looks like nobody but himself," said Mrs. Owens, firmly.
... It was then that ... the child opened its eyes wide in wakefulness.
It stared around it ...
(Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (2008), p. 25)
For non-human animals
The Quirk et al. 1985 grammar states that the use of gendered ''he'' or ''she'' is optional for non-human animals of known sex. It gives the following example, which illustrates the use of both the gender-neutral possessive ''its'' and the gendered possessive ''her'' to refer to a bird:
(28) ''The robin builds its nest in a well-chosen position ...''
''and, after the eggs have hatched, the mother bird feeds her young there for several weeks...''
(Quirk et al., A comprehensive grammar of the English language (1985), p. 316–317, 342)
''One'' as a gender-neutral pronoun
Another gender-neutral pronoun that can be used to refer to people is the impersonal pronoun
''One'' is an English language, gender-neutral, indefinite pronoun that means, roughly, "a person". For purposes of verb agreement it is a third-person singular pronoun, though it sometimes appears with first- or second-person reference. It is ...
" one". This can be used in conjunction with the generic he
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a v ...
according to the preference and style of the writer.
*''Each student should save his questions until the end.''
*''One should save one's questions until the end.''
*''One should save his questions until the end.''
In everyday language, generic ''you'' is often used instead of ''one'':
*''You should save your questions until the end.''
Historical, regional, and proposed gender-neutral singular pronouns
Historically, there were two gender-neutral pronouns native to English dialects, ''ou'' and ''(h)a''. According to Dennis Baron's ''Grammar and Gender'':
Relics of these gender-neutral terms survive in some British dialects of Modern English — for example ''hoo'' for 'she', in Yorkshire — and sometimes a pronoun of one gender can be applied to a human or non-human animal of the opposite gender.
* ''hoo'' is also sometimes used in the West Midlands
West or Occident is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth.
Etymology
The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some ...
and south-west England as a common gender pronoun
* ''er'' can be used in place of either ''he'' or ''she'' in some West Country dialect
West Country English is a group of English language varieties and accents used by much of the native population of South West England, the area sometimes popularly known as the West Country.
The West Country is often defined as encompassin ...
s, although only in weak (unstressed
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as i ...
) positions such as in tag questions
* ''hye'' could refer to either ''he'' or ''she'' in Essex
Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and G ...
in the south-east of England, in the Middle English period
* ''yo'': a 2007 paper reports that in some schools in the city of Baltimore
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
, '' yo'' has come to be used as a gender-neutral pronoun.
Since at least the 19th century, numerous proposals for the use of other non-standard gender-neutral pronouns have been introduced:
* ''thon'', proposed by Charles Crozat Converse in 1884 — other sources date its coinage to 1858 — received the greatest mainstream acceptance. A contraction of 'that one', ''thon'' was listed in ''Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary'' from 1898 through to 1964, and was also included in ''Webster's Second New International Dictionary'' (but not in its the first and third editions).
* ''co'' was coined by the feminist writer Mary Orovan in 1970. It is in common usage in intentional communities
An intentional community is a voluntary residential community which is designed to have a high degree of social cohesion and teamwork from the start. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political, religious, ...
of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities
The Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC) is a group of egalitarian communitiesO'Brien, EllenSome communes have survived -- and prospered -- beyond the '60s.''Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.'' 23 Sept. 1996. which have joined together wi ...
, appearing in the bylaws of several of these communities. In addition to using ''co'' when the gender of the antecedent is unknown or indeterminate, some use ''co'' as gender-blind language, where ''co'' replaces gendered pronouns.
* ''ze'' has several variants (see table below) and is used to meet the needs of unspecified gender situations and transgender
A transgender (often abbreviated as trans) person is someone whose gender identity or gender expression does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth. Many transgender people experience dysphoria, which they seek to alleviate through ...
persons. Kate Bornstein, an American transgender author, uses the pronoun forms ''ze'' and ''hir'' in the 1996 book ''Nearly Roadkill: an Infobahn erotic adventure''. Jeffrey A. Carver, an American science fiction writer, uses the pronoun ''hir'' in the 1989 novel ''From a Changeling Star'' for a different-gendered nonhuman.
Table of standard and non-standard third-person singular pronouns
Emergence of gender-neutral pronouns in languages with grammatical gender
French ''iel'' = ''il'' + ''elle''
In 2021, the dictionary Le Petit Robert de la Langue Française added a third-person gender neutral pronoun to its lexicon: iel (plural ''iels''). Although Le Petit Robert
''Le Petit Robert de la Langue Française'' (), known as just ''Petit Robert'', is a popular single-volume French dictionary first published by Paul Robert in 1967. It is an abridgement of his eight-volume ''Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogi ...
has added iel, there is no discussion in its entry regarding how the language, which uses a grammatical gender system in which every content word has a gender, should proceed with agreement.
As reported in the ''New York Times'', this merger of the third person masculine pronoun ''il'' 'he' and the third person feminine pronoun ''elle'' 'she' is used to refer to a person of any gender. It has caused controversy amongst both linguists and politicians who claim that the French language cannot be manipulated. The dictionary takes the position that it is observing how the French language evolves, adding it as a point of reference. However, the Larousse (a prominent encyclopedia of the French language) disagrees, calling iel a "pseudo pronoun".
Swedish ''hen''
The Swedish language
Swedish ( ) is a North Germanic language spoken predominantly in Sweden and in parts of Finland. It has at least 10 million native speakers, the fourth most spoken Germanic language and the first among any other of its type in the Nordic countr ...
has a four-gender distinction for definite singular third-person pronouns:
* masculine singular ''han'' 'he'
* feminine singular ''hon'' 'she'
* common singular ''den'' 'it'
* neuter singular ''det'' 'it
The indefinite/ impersonal third person is gender-neutral, as is the plural third person:
* plural third person ''de''
* ''man'' 'someone'
As for first-person and second-person pronouns, they are gender-neutral in both the singular and plural
* first person: singular ''jag''; plural ''vi''
* second-person: singular ''du''; plural ''ni''
On nouns, the neuter gender is marked by the definite singular suffixal article -''t'', whereas common gender is marked with the suffix 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 gender distinction in the plural.
In Swedish, the word ''hen'' was introduced generally in the 2000s as a complement to the gender-specific ''hon'' ("she") and ''han'' ("he"). 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 Rolf is a male given name and a surname. It originates in the Germanic name ''Hrolf'', itself a contraction of ''Hrodwulf'' ( Rudolf), a conjunction of the stem words ''hrod'' ("renown") + ''wulf'' ("wolf"). The Old Norse cognate is ''Hrólfr''. A ...
. 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
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
that is gender-neutral, since Finnish
Finnish may refer to:
* Something or someone from, or related to Finland
* Culture of Finland
* Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland
* Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people
* Finnish cuisine
See also ...
completely lacks grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
. In 2009 it was included in Nationalencyklopedin
''Nationalencyklopedin'' (; "The National Encyclopedia" in English), abbreviated NE, is a comprehensive contemporary Swedish-language encyclopedia, initiated by a favourable loan from the Government of Sweden of 17 million Swedish kronor in 19 ...
. 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
''Svenska Akademiens ordlista'' (, "Word list of the Swedish Academy"), abbreviated SAOL, is a spelling dictionary published every few years by the Swedish Academy. It is a single volume that is considered the final arbiter of Swedish spelling. ...
'', the most authoritative spelling dictionary of the Swedish language, by the Swedish Academy
The Swedish Academy ( sv, Svenska Akademien), founded in 1786 by King Gustav III of Sweden, Gustav III, is one of the Swedish Royal Academies, Royal Academies of Sweden. Its 18 members, who are elected for life, comprise the highest Swedish lang ...
.
, Swedish manuals of style treat "hen" as a neologism
A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
. Major newspapers like ''Dagens Nyheter
''Dagens Nyheter'' (, ), abbreviated ''DN'', is a daily newspaper in Sweden. It is published in Stockholm and aspires to full national and international coverage, and is widely considered Sweden's newspaper of record.
History and profile
''Da ...
'' 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'' ("her/him"); 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
A transgender (often abbreviated as trans) person is someone whose gender identity or gender expression does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth. Many transgender people experience dysphoria, which they seek to alleviate through ...
, who prefer to identify themselves as belonging to a third gender
Third gender is a concept in which individuals are categorized, either by themselves or by society, as neither man nor woman. It is also a social category present in societies that recognize three or more genders. The term ''third'' is usually ...
or who reject the division of male/female gender roles on ideological grounds. Its entry will cover two definitions: as a reference to an 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" ("the referred person") and "man" ("one", as in "Man borde..."/"One should...") 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" ("this one or she/he") may refer to a non-gender-specific referent already or soon-to-be mentioned ("Vederbörande kan, om denne så vill,..."/"The referent may, if he wishes,..."). Because "denne" is objectively masculine, the use of the word to refer to anyone irrespective of gender is not recommended. 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 ("Barnet får om ''det'' vill."/"The child is allowed to, if ''it'' wants to." The word "barn"/child is grammatically neuter, thus the use of the third-person neuter pronoun "det"); some nouns retain their traditional pronouns, e.g., "man"/"man" uses "han"/"he", and "kvinna"/"woman" 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, so "han"/"hon" is preferred, for example about children or work titles such as "föraren" ("driver") or "rörmokaren" ("plumber").
Norwegian ''hen''
As a continuation of earlier discussions along the same lines as well as the continuing uptake, the Language Council of Norway
The Language Council of Norway ( no, Språkrådet, ) is the consultative body of the Norwegian state on language issues. It was established in 2005 and replaced the Norwegian Language Council (, ) which existed from 1974 to 2005. It is a subsidiar ...
proposes the gender-neutral pronoun (from Swedish ; compare Finnish ) to be recognised officially.
Previously, the gender-neutral pronoun has been proposed to fill the gap between the third person pronouns ('she') and ('he'). However, the usage of has not widely embraced, as it is rarely used, and even then only by limited special interest groups. A reason for the marginal interest in a neuter gender word is the constructed nature of the word, together with the fact that the word is homonymous with several older words both in official language and dialectal speech, such as ('the other') and ('beyond'). One can also use or or ( means 'one'). These three are considered impersonal.
Amongst LGBT
' is an initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. In use since the 1990s, the initialism, as well as some of its common variants, functions as an umbrella term for sexuality and gender identity.
The LGBT term is a ...
interest groups the word ''hen'' is now in use after the Swedish implementation in 2010.
Emergence of gendered pronouns in languages without grammatical gender
Mandarin
Lack of gender contrasts in spoken language
Traditionally the third person pronoun in Mandarin is gender-neutral. In spoken standard Mandarin
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standar ...
, there is no gender distinction in personal pronouns: ''tā'' can mean 'he' or 'she' (or even 'it' for non-human objects). Although it is claimed that when the antecedent of the spoken pronoun ''tā'' is unclear, native speakers assume it is a male person, no evidence is given to support this claim. Many studies instead demonstrate the opposite: Mandarin speakers do not differentiate pronoun genders in the composition of the preverbal message that guides grammatical encoding during language production. Even proficient bilingual Mandarin-English learners do not process gender information in the conceptualizer. As a result, Mandarin speakers often mix up the gendered pronouns of European languages in speech. Even if they seldom make other types of errors, native Mandarin speakers can make such pronoun errors when speaking in English. This is even the case after they have been living in an immersive environment and after having attained a relatively high English level.
Emergence of gender contrasts via orthography
Although spoken Mandarin remains ungendered, a specific written form for "she" ( ''tā'') was created in the early twentieth century under the influence of European languages. In today's written Chinese, the same sound is written with different characters: (''tā'') for "he", (''tā'') for "she" and (''tā'') for "it". However, such distinction did not exist before the late 1910s. There was only (''tā'') for third person pronoun, which did not specify gender or humanness.
In 1917, the influential poet and linguist Liu Bannong
Liu Bannong (; May 29, 1891 – July 14, 1934) or Liu Fu () was a Chinese poet and linguist. He was a leader in the May Fourth Movement. He made great contributions to modern Chinese literature, phonology and photography.
Life
A son of the edu ...
borrowed the Old Chinese
Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ...
graph (''tā'', with the radical ''nǚ'' which means "female") into the written language to specifically represent "she". As a result, the old character (''tā''), which previously could also refer to females, has become sometimes restricted to meaning "he" only in written texts. The character has the radical ''rén'' () with means "human", which also shows it originally was a generic term for people in general instead of a term for males, which should take the radical for male, ''nán'' (), like other Chinese characters that represent specifically male concepts.
The creation of gendered pronouns in Chinese orthography was part of the May Fourth Movement
The May Fourth Movement was a Chinese anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement which grew out of student protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919. Students gathered in front of Tiananmen (The Gate of Heavenly Peace) to protest the Chinese ...
to modernize Chinese culture, and specifically an attempt to assert sameness between Chinese and European languages, which generally have gendered pronouns. The leaders of the movement also coined other characters, such for objects, ( radical: ''niú'' , "cow") for animals, and ( radical: ''shì'' , "god") for gods. Their pronunciations were all ''tā''. The latter two have fallen out of use in mainland China.
Liu and other writers of that period tried to popularize a different pronunciation for the feminine pronoun, including ''yi'' from the Wu dialect
The Wu languages (; Romanization of Wu Chinese, Wu romanization and Romanization of Wu Chinese#IPA, IPA: ''wu6 gniu6'' [] (Shanghainese), ''ng2 gniu6'' [] (Suzhounese), Mandarin pinyin and IPA: ''Wúyǔ'' []) is a major group of Sinitic languag ...
and ''tuo'' from a Literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters, literary reading, but these efforts failed, and all forms of the third person pronoun retain identical pronunciation. (This situation of identical pronunciation with split characters is present not only in Mandarin but also in many dialects and varieties of Chinese
Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...
.)
The Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...
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
Written Cantonese is the most complete written form of Chinese after that for Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese. Written Chinese was originally developed for Classical Chinese, and was the main literary language of China until the 19th cent ...
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.
There is a recent trend on the Internet for people to write "TA" in Latin script
The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...
, derived from the pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...
romanization of Chinese, as a gender-neutral pronoun.
Japanese
Emergence of gendered third-person forms
Pure personal pronouns do not exist in traditional Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
, as pronouns are generally dropped. In addition, reference to a person is using their name with a suffix such as the gender-neutral -''san'' added to it. For example:
"She (Ms. Saitō) came" would be "斎藤さんが来ました" (''Saitō-san ga kimashita'').
In modern Japanese, ''kare'' () is the male and ''kanojo'' () the female third-person pronouns. Historically, ''kare'' was a word in the demonstrative paradigm (i.e., a system involving demonstrative prefixes, ''ko-'', ''so-'', ''a-'' (historical: ka-), and ''do-''), 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'' (adnominal
In linguistics, an adjunct is an optional, or ''structurally dispensable'', part of a sentence, clause, or phrase that, if removed or discarded, will not structurally affect the remainder of the sentence. Example: In the sentence ''John helped Bill ...
(rentaishi) version of ''ka-'') and ''jo'' ("woman"), coined for the translation of its Western equivalents. It was not until the Meiji period
The is an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912.
The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization ...
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—''kare-shi'' and ''kanojo'' are commonly used today to mean 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend' respectively.[Japanese: Revised Edition](_blank)
, Iwasaki, Shoichi. Japanese: Shoichi Iwasaki. Philadelphia, PA: J. Benjamins, 2002. Print.
Emergence of gendered first-person forms
First-person pronouns, ''ore'', ''boku'', and ''atashi'', while not explicitly carrying gender, can strongly imply gender based on inherent levels of politeness or formality as well as hierarchical connotations. While ''boku'' and ''ore'' are traditionally characterized as masculine pronouns, ''atashi'' is characterized as feminine. In addition, of the two masculine leaning pronouns, ''boku'' is considered to be less masculine than ''ore'' and often connote a softer form of masculinity. When wishing to connote a sense of authority and confidence to their interlocutors, male speakers tend to used the first-person form ''ore''.[Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People](_blank)
, Okamoto, Shigeko, and Janet S. Shibamoto. Smith. Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology: Cultural Models and Real People. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.
See also
*Epicenity
Epicenity is the lack of gender distinction, often reducing the emphasis on the masculine to allow the feminine. It includes androgyny – having both masculine and feminine characteristics. The adjective ''gender-neutral'' may describe epicenit ...
*Gender marking in job titles
A gender-specific job title is a name of a job that also specifies or implies the gender of the person performing that job. For example, in English, the job title ''stewardess'' implies that the person is female. A gender-neutral job title, on the ...
*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 no ...
*Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender
Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender is the usage of wording that is balanced in its treatment of the genders in a non-grammatical sense.
For example, advocates of gender-neutral language challenge the traditional use of masc ...
*Generic antecedent
Generic antecedents are representatives of classes, referred to in ordinary language by another word (most often a pronoun), in a situation in which gender is typically unknown or irrelevant. These mostly arise in generalizations and are particul ...
*Pronoun game
"Playing the pronoun game" is the act of concealing sexual orientation in conversation by not using a gender-specific pronoun for a partner or a lover, which would reveal the sexual orientation of the person speaking. Someone may employ the prono ...
*Feminist language reform
Feminist language reform or feminist language planning refers to the effort, often of political and grassroots movements, to change how language is used to gender people, activities and ideas on an individual and societal level. This initiative h ...
*LGBT linguistics
LGBT linguistics is the study of language as used by members of LGBT communities. Related or synonymous terms include lavender linguistics, advanced by William Leap in the 1990s, which "encompass sa wide range of everyday language practices" ...
Specific languages
*Gender neutrality in English
Gender-neutral language is language that minimizes assumptions about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing. In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, English does not retain grammatical gender and ...
* Gender-neutral pronouns in Esperanto
*Gender neutrality in Spanish
Feminist language reform has proposed gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender, such as Spanish. Grammatical gender in Spanish refers to how Spanish nouns are categorized as either masculine (often ending in -o) or feminine (often ...
*Gender neutrality in Portuguese
Gender-neutral language in Portuguese is a recent strand of demands for greater gender equality and social inclusion between men, women and non-binary individuals. It can be divided into inclusive or non- sexist language, and non-binary or neute ...
Notes
Further reading
* (includes chapters on "she" for ships and generic he
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a v ...
)
External links
Gender-free Legal Writing
The Epicene Pronouns: A Chronology of the Word That Failed
(gender-neutral pronoun history)
*
Regender
can translate webpages to use gender-neutral pronouns.
Is there a gender-neutral substitute for "his or her"?
Grammar Girl, Quick and Dirty tips for Better Writing / Yo as Pronoun.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gender-Neutral Pronoun
Gender-neutral language
Grammatical gender
Pronouns
Modern English personal pronouns