Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns

In others, such as many of the Niger–Congo languages, there is a system of grammatical gender (or noun classes), but the divisions are based on classifications other than sex, such as animacy, rationality, or countability.

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.

[12] This collective masculine is also the case in ancient languages, like Classical Greek and Biblical Hebrew and have influenced the modern forms.

For people who are transgender, style guides and associations of journalists and health professionals advise use of the pronoun preferred or considered appropriate by the person in question.

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.

[32] 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.

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.

[39][40] In the twenty-first century, syntactic research differentiates three groups of English speakers which can be identified, based on their judgments about pronoun usage for (14), (15) and (16).

[30][38] A recent study by Kirby Conrod found these speaker groups to be correlated with age and gender identity.

[41] 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.

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.

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.

Susanne Wagner observed 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.

[46] For example, William Safire 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".

Such examples point to the fact indiscriminate use of generic he leads to non-sensical violations of semantic gender agreement.

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 lsuch as (26).

[67] According to Dennis Baron's Grammar and Gender:[68] In 1789, William H. Marshall records the existence of a dialectal English epicene pronoun, singular "ou": "'Ou will' expresses either he will, she will, or it will."

It was originally created by science fiction and fantasy writer Jacek Dukaj, for his 2004 book Perfect Imperfection.

From the surname of the author, this, and similar neopronouns created by him, are referred to as dukaizmy, and after term coined by him, the post-gender pronouns (Polish: zaimki postpłciowe).

For people and animals with specified gender, the masculine or feminine pronouns are used, but the nouns still take either neutral or common articles.

Another method is writing the pronoun in the referent's grammatical gender ("Barnet får om det vill.

In spoken standard Mandarin, there is no gender distinction in personal pronouns: tā can mean 'he' or 'she' (or even 'it' for non-human objects).

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.

[128] Although spoken Mandarin remains ungendered, a specific written form for 'she' (她 tā) was created in the early twentieth century under the influence of European languages.

In 1917, the influential poet and linguist Liu Bannong borrowed the Old Chinese graph 她 (tā, with the radical nǚ 女 which means 'female') into the written language to specifically represent 'she'.

[130] As of 2013, there is a recent trend on the Internet for people to write "TA" in Latin script, derived from the pinyin romanization of Chinese, as a gender-neutral pronoun.

The feminine counterpart kanojo, on the other hand, is a combination of kano (adnominal (rentaishi) version of ka-) and jo ('woman'), coined for the translation of its Western equivalents.

It was not until the Meiji period that kare and kanojo were commonly used as the masculine and feminine pronoun in the same way as their Western equivalents.

When wishing to connote a sense of authority and confidence to their interlocutors, male speakers tend to use the first-person form ore.[134]