Gender Pronouns

Several years ago at a con session on the fantastic Pixar movie INSIDE OUT, starring personified emotions, someone in the audience asked why characters representing feelings had to be identified as male or female. Why did they need genders at all? The answer didn't occur to me until later: English doesn't have a neuter pronoun for a living, sapient creature. Since the characters of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust in the film couldn't be called "it," they had to be labeled either "he" or "she." French, Spanish, etc. classify all nouns as masculine or feminine, not just those that refer to living creatures, with pronouns to match. Some other languages such as German and Latin have masculine, feminine, and neuter. However, as I discovered more recently, this requirement to distinguish the sexes by grammatical gender isn't universal among Earth languages.

I was surprised to learn that many languages have no gender pronouns to identify male and female, e.g, Tagalog, Turkish, Estonian, and some Chinese dialects, among others. Some have grammatical gender categorized by traits other than biological sex, such as animate and inanimate. Here's the Wikipedia article on this topic:

Genderless Languages

The Wikipedia page on the broad subject of gender-neutral pronouns in languages with sex-linked gender distinctions, such as English:

Gender Neutrality in Languages with Gendered Pronouns

A detailed overview of grammatical gender, citing several examples that classify nouns according to criteria other than biological sex:

Grammatical Gender

An English speaker's mind is apt to be boggled by the vast number of personal pronouns in Japanese (mine certainly was upon my first exposure to this fact). Many are distinguished by degrees of formality. Not only third-person but first-person pronouns often have masculine or feminine connotations. Some are used predominantly by a particular sex but not always. And some are gender-neutral.

Japanese Pronouns

I don't hold with the Newspeak premise in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR that language controls thought. (And I don't think many professional linguists nowadays accept that position.) However, available vocabulary does make it easier or harder to talk about certain concepts. I do wonder how American society might be different if English had no gender-specific pronouns. Would people who identify as nonbinary have an easier time if they didn't have to choose invented pronouns or the awkward singular "they"? Would transgender people have it easier if relieved of one difficulty, persuading others to refer to them by their preferred pronouns instead of the "dead" ones? I wonder how language affects such issues in countries with gender-neutral personal pronouns.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt