I’m learning Russian and I don’t know what it is for that, but in German I’ve seen “xier”, “sier”, and “dey”. I might use “dey/dem”.
Swedish isn’t exactly “my language”, but it is the language I know best after English. Plural they is de and singular they is hen (to contrast with hon for she and han for he). It’s been in use for decades, but only got officially added in the 2010s.
And Finnish just uses hän for everyone, which is supreme.
I thought Han supremacy was China not Finland.
You must be thinking of Börne.
they/them user here! in my lwmguage, its they/them (im english.) hope this helps!
What language is the word lwmguage though
Talking-with-food-in-mouth-lish
not-used-to-this-new-keyboard-yet-ese lol
UwU language.
My language Persian doesn’t have gendered pronouns at all
Not sure if problem solved or even bigger problem.
Sorry my comment was misleading i meant to say my language does not have gendered pronouns
In French we have “iel”. It’s a mix of the male and female pronoms “il” and “elle”.
Don’t forget that other contraption : for “those” we have “celles” + “ceux” = “celleux” (and probably celle + celui into cuielle or something)
Then let’s have fun with everybody : “toutes” and “tous” is an easy one - toustes !
Checking wikipedia on the matter, TIL that until the XII century French had neutrals “al” or “el”, and these are proposed for a comeback
I am sincerely 100% for the transformation of language towards eradication of the default masculine and the new pronouns, but changing habits is hard.
In German there is nothing established. The most common one I have heard which is still unknown by most is “en/en” (not sure if written correctly).
dey/deren gibt es auch noch.
“Ő”. Everyone is “ő” in Hungarian, we don’t have gendered pronouns.
The language I know best besides English is Spanish, but since it’s not my culture, I decided to look it up, and there’s actually an interesting Wikipedia article about it.
There’s a separate page for a proposed single nonbinary pronoun “Elle” (pronounced A-yay) which I really like.
Being a romance language, nouns in Spanish are also gendered, and use a gender modifier such as -a or -o. The elle pronoun is typically associated with -e forms of the nouns
Some names don’t follow that rule. Rocio is a woman’s name.
There’s no real consensus on it yet in Dutch, but the most common are either hen/hun or die/diens. Both are known words that can be repurposed, but both have some disadvantages when it comes to certain grammatical rules.
There’s also some initiatives on new words, but they haven’t really gotten much traction yet.There’s a rather lengthy article here in Dutch that explains it in depth:
https://taaladvies.net/taal-en-gender-verwijswoorden-voor-vrouwen-mannen-en-non-binaire-personen-algemeen/Yeah. They/them feels quite natural, but compared to that all Dutch alternatives feel a bit forced. Maybe it’s better just to find something new, but good luck teaching those to people.
Instead of having different words for plural of pronouns, in Chinese we append a character after single pronouns to make them plural.
- 我 (me) -> 我們 (us)
- 你 (you) -> 你們 (you all)
- 他 (him) -> 他們 (them (male))
- 她 (her) -> 她們 (them (female))
You get the idea. We also have pronouns for animals (牠), inanimate objects (它) and God (祂), and you can similarly add 們 to make them plural (except for god, I haven’t seen the character being used in plural). Using they/them as pronoun for a person doesn’t make sense in Chinese.
Chinese used to have no gender pronouns. Everyone is referred to as 他 (Mandarin) or 佢 (Cantonese). It’s in last century when 她 (“she”) is “invented”, and no new gender pronouns in Cantonese. However, in terms of speaking, they are all pronounced the same way (ta1 in Mandarin, keoi5 in Cantonese), so it’s literally impossible to use the wrong pronoun if you’re speaking or typing in Cantonese.
Disclaimer: I’m learning Japanese & I don’t know Chinese.
It looks like the original character for the 3rf person pronoun is now the masculine pronoun & the female pronoun is made by substituting the person component (人, I don’t know how to type the left-component form) with the woman component (女).
That’s exactly how to understand them
Does Chinese only have the one 1st person pronoun?
As far as I know, yes in modern Chinese. However if you include ancient Chinese there’s also 吾
他 isn’t the pronoun for masculine third person. It’s third person, period. Neutral gender if one has to ask.
Traditionally the character used to mean “that” is 彼. Apparently it’s also gender-neutral.
I don’t think Croatian has it, and it is very gendered language. But some ideas
3rd person singular “ono” is literally translated “it” in English might work, but it feels dehumanizing when referred to one specific person, at least to me.
In my opinion what might work are 3rd person plural “oni” idk kinda hard when language is gendered.
In Turkish it’s all O. We do not have gendered pronouns, a singular third person is “o”, plural third person is “onlar”.
I’m glad our language isn’t gendered. I can’t imagine the centuries of shitshow would happen.
Year xxx: We need to make our pronouns gendered so that it’s easier to communicate!
Year 1xxx: We need to declare ourselves as non-binary, and especially get mad when called him or her, to fuck with the language!
Turkic languages never had been gendered ☝️🤓. Nice joke nonetheless.
Swahili has 10 different “genders,” called “noun classes” or “ngeli,” and none of them correlate with sex. Instead, the third-person singular pronouns are:
- he/she and him/her: yeye
- his/her: wake
https://pronouns.page/ has some good information for pretty much every language.
I’m not Chinese, but in Mandarin, he and she are both pronounced “ta” (first tone, flat intonation), even though they’re written differently.
There is the non-gendered 它 which is also pronounced “tā”.
In Italian it’s not really used. There’s an extremely fringe group of people who use singular pronouns “Io” (I) but plural adjectives and participles. “Io sono andati” instead of “Io sono andato” or “Io sono stanchi” instead of “Io sono stanco”.
These are regarded as people who spend too much time on Tumblr and consume American media even within the most militant corners of the transfeminist movement, so it doesn’t have much traction.
Most of the discourse is about gender-neutral language rather than pronouns.
To add to the confusion, Italian has no neutral gender, only male and female, but it retains neutral pronouns: esso/essi. The problem is that by ending in “o”, most people think this is an alternative masculine pronoun and use it interchangeably with the masculine pronouns “egli” or “lui”.
