Gender-neutral pronoun

Gender-neutral or epicene pronouns are pronouns that neither reveal nor imply sex or gender when referring to people, animals or things.

In English, the only gender-specific pronouns are the third-person singular: he, him, himself, his, she, her, herself, and hers. The third-person plural pronouns they, them, themselves, their, and theirs work equally well for either sex, as do the others, such as I, thou, we, you, and so on.

For those people seeking to use gender-neutral language, this is a problem. Common solutions include singular they, the generic male, he or she, using he and she in alternate passages, and rewording sentences [1].

There were two gender neutral pronouns native to English, ou and a, but they have long since died out of usage. According to Dennis Baron's Grammar and Gender:

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." Marshall traces ou to Middle English epicene a, used by the fourteenth-century English writer John of Trevisa, and both the OED and Wright's English Dialect Dictionary confirm the use of a for he, she, it, they, and even I.

The dialectal epicene pronoun a is a reduced form of the Old and Middle English masculine and feminine pronouns he and heo. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the masculine and feminine pronouns had developed to a point where, according to the OED, they were "almost or wholly indistinguishable in pronunciation." The modern feminine pronoun she, which first appears in the mid twelfth century, seems to have been drafted at least partly to reduce the increasing ambiguity of the pronoun system....

He goes on to describe how relics of these sex-neutral terms survive in some British dialects of Modern English, and sometimes a pronoun of one gender might be applied to a person or animal of the opposite gender. source

The following sets of neologisms have their own articles, though they are all very rare and most commentators do not believe any of them will ever become widespread:

• Sie and hir
• Spivak pronouns
• It
• Xe (pronoun)

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis can be interpreted to predict that people will be less sexist if they don't distinguish between genders in pronouns and other aspects of speech.

Example

Co is one example of a proposed third person, singular, gender-neutral pronoun. The subject and object form are the same, and the possessive pronoun is cos.

Modern Chinese

The pronoun 他 (tā) means "he" and "she". So gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun should not be a problem in Chinese. However, at the time around May Fourth Movement, a new pronoun 她 (tā) has been invented to represent "she" and 他 is now often used as "he" only. It is called "modernisation" (after European languages). Sometimes 他/她 is used to mean "he/she", opponents view this usage as unnecessarily cumbersome.

Both pronouns are pronounced identically; the difference appears only in writing.

Japanese

Japanese underwent a transition similar to Chinese in which the gender neutral third person referent "kare" (彼) became associated with he, while the word "kanojo" (彼女) was invented to represent she in translated Western novels. Today, "kare" is exclusively masculine. The words can also imply boyfriend and girlfriend respectively.

Two politer third-person referents, "ano hito" and "ano kata", also exist, and are perhaps more common in everyday usage; these are both gender-neutral.

Finnish

Like other Finno-Ugric languages, Finnish pronouns make no distinction between male and female. The Finnish third-person singular personal pronoun (he/she) is hän. In colloquial use this is often replaced with se, as hän is perceived as overly formal.

Esperanto

Standard Esperanto has the third person pronouns ŝi, li, and ĝi for she, he, and it, respectively; however, some speakers use the neologism ri as a gender-neutral third person pronoun. This usage is called riism.

Swedish

In some dialects there is a word "hän" that means either han (him) or hon (her). It has from dialect spread to be used in hacker slang.

See also

• Gender-specific pronoun

External links

• Gender-Neutral Pronouns - a style guide
• Gender Neutral Pronoun Frequently Asked Questions
• Gender-free Legal Writing
• The Epicene Pronouns: A Chronology of the Word That Failed
• On the Creation of "She " in Japanese
• Footnotes: pronouns
• "Riismo" in Esperanto (in Esperanto)