Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns

"S/he" and "He/she" redirect here. For the music album, see s/he (album). For the pornographic term, see He-she. For other uses, see He and She (disambiguation).

A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener.[1] Some languages, such as Slavic, with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological sex.[2] Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender.[1]

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.

  1. ^ a b Siewierska, Anna (2005). "Gender Distinctions in Independent Personal Pronouns". In Haspelmath, Martin; Dryer, Matthew S.; Gil, David; Comrie, Bernard (eds.). The World Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford University Press. pp. 182–185. ISBN 0-19-925591-1.
  2. ^ Audring, Jenny (1 October 2008). "Gender assignment and gender agreement: Evidence from pronominal gender languages". Morphology. 18 (2): 93–116. doi:10.1007/s11525-009-9124-y. ISSN 1871-5621.