Gender neutrality in genderless languages

A discourse in a grammatically genderless language is not necessarily gender-neutral,[1] although genderless languages exclude many possibilities for reinforcement of gender-related stereotypes, as they still include words with gender-specific meanings (such as "son" and "daughter"), and may include gender distinctions among pronouns (such as "he" and "she").

[2] Native nouns also feature this characteristic, normally with the addition of lalaki ("male") or babae ("female") to the noun to signify gender in terms such as anak na lalaki ("son") or babaeng kambing ("she-goat").

The gender neutral term 'Filipinx' has gained popularity especially among Filipino-Americans as a demonym or an adjective.

[14] The use of the neuter pronoun 'it' is most commonly used in reference to non-personified objects and animals rather than for people.

Most nouns have no gender, though there are different words for females and males in some cases (ama, "mother"; aita, "father"; guraso, "parent").

Some words are differentiated according to gender, like in the English language (aktoresa, "actress"; aktore, "actor"), but they are not the main rule.

[20] In earlier stages, the relation between hik and zuk was like that of you and thou in early modern English.

A perception developed that associates hika to spontaneity, peasantness, directness, values linked to Basque rural males, while the formal forms are used by women.

Females would become maids, waitresses, shop clerks where informal Basque would be felt improper.

[21] Non-sexism supporters propose substituting those forms by the more formal ones: zuk duzu "you have it".

brother, to fraternize), phrases such as uskottu mies (trustee, executor, administrator), idioms (e.g. olla oma herransa, to be one's own master), and proverbs (e.g. auta miestä mäessä, älä mäen alla; help a man on the hill, not under the hill).

While translations are not typically representative of linguistic data, similar asymmetry was also observed in Turkish literary and newspaper texts.

[25] Swahili is a Bantu language spoken in many parts of Africa such as Kenya and Tanzania.

Words such as actor/actress (mwigaji wa hadithi) and waiter/waitress (mtumishi mezani) are gender neutral among most others in the language.

Chinese has no inflections for gender, tense, or case, so comprehension is almost wholly dependent on word order.

There are also very few, if any, derivational inflections; instead, the language relies heavily on compounding to create new words.

Spoken Mandarin Chinese also has only one third-person singular pronoun, tā for all referents.

Replacing the "亻" radical with "女" (in pronoun 佢) forms the character 姖, has a separate meaning in written Cantonese.