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Finno-Ugric languagesFinnishFinnish has only gender-neutral pronouns (it completely lacks grammatical gender). The word hän is completely gender-neutral and means both she and he. The suffix -tar or -tär can be added to some words (mostly professions) to "feminize" the word, for example näyttelijä (actor) - näyttelijätär (actress) if required, but these forms are not commonly used any more; using the basic word for both genders (näyttelijä for male and female actors) is the norm. There are also some professions or expressions in which the word mies (man) is an integral part (for example, puhemies, meaning chairman; palomies, fireman, etc.). These are mostly retained in their traditional forms (unless a suitable gender-free word is easily available). As a special case the chairperson of Finnish Parliament is referred as puhemies irrespective of the actual gender of the person - either herra puhemies (Mr. Chairman) or rouva puhemies (Mrs. or Madame Chairman).
EstonianEstonian word ta (or tema) is gender-neutral and means both she and he. The suffix -tar or -nna can be added to the end of some words (mostly professions), although these nouns are in their basic form gender-neutral: laulja (singer), lauljatar or lauljanna (female singer); näitleja (actor) - näitlejanna or näitlejatar (actress). This is rather common. Also, for instance, there are separate words for Chairman: "esimees" (Chairman) and "esinaine" (Chairwoman), although the first form is used a lot more often. Most of the professions are gender-neutral: politseinik (policeman or woman), arst (doctor), müüja (salesman or woman), õpetaja (teacher), sõdur (soldier), ehitaja (builder), even lüpsja (milkmaid, male or female). Well-known exception is med. õde (nurse, literally "med(ical) sister"). There are some words that are clearly masculine or feminine. For example, in Estonian language, there is no Motherland, there is only Fatherland (isamaa) and Homeland (kodumaa), and "mother's" (native) tongue (emakeel). A very popular Estonian saying is "Kes ees, see mees" -- "The first one is the man". HungarianHungarian does not have gender-specific pronouns and lacks grammatical gender: referring to a gender needs explicit statement of "the man" (he) or "the woman" (she). The 3rd. person singular pronoun ő means "he/she" and ők means "they". Hungarian distinguishes persons and things, as you refer to things as az (it) or azok (those).
Indo-Iranian languagesPersianPersian is a gender-neutral language. For both males and females, the same nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are used. BengaliIn Bengali, although there are different nouns for professions, they are not commonly used, so the language has consequently become gender-neutral. In addition, objects, pronouns and almost all adjectives are gender-neutral. Other natural languagesBasqueThe Basque language is remarkably gender-free. Most nouns have no gender or there are different words for males and females (ama, "mother"; aita, "father"; aita-ama, "father and mother"; guraso, "parent"). Some words take suffixes according to gender (aktore, "actor"; aktoresa, "actress"), but they are rare, and both purists who avoid Romance influence and the Basque Institute of the Woman recommend against it. For animals, there are particles (oilo, "hen"; oilar, "cock"; hartz eme, "female bear"; hartz arra, "male bear") or different words (behi, "cow"; zezen, "bull"). While there are no gender-specific pronouns, verbs can mark gender in the intimate singular second person (this provides no information since the listener already knows his or her gender): hik duk, "you (male) have it"; hik dun, "you (female) have it". The verb is marked for addressee's gender, if they are intimate singular, whether or not they are referred to in the clause. Non-sexism supporters propose substituting those forms by the more formal ones: zuk duzu "you have it". In earlier stages, the relation between hik and zuk was like that of you and thou in old English. Some Basque dialects already avoid hik as too disrespectful. The use of a gender-free language has not made the historical Basque society a non-sexist one. ChineseThe various forms of the Chinese language are remarkably gender-neutral due to its underlying structure, and possesses few linguistic markers of gender, even though Chinese society has historically been shown to have significant degree of male dominance in the social structure as well as education and written literature. Critics of gender-neutral language modification in other languages see this as evidence of a lack of cause-and-effect relationship between a society's gender relations and the use of grammatical gender in its language. Comprehension in Chinese is almost wholly dependent on word order as Chinese has no inflection for gender, tense, or case. There is also very little derivational inflection, instead the language relies heavily on compounding to create new words. A Chinese word is thus inherently gender-neutral unless it contains a root for man or woman. For example, the word for doctor is yīshēng (醫生) and can only be made gender-specific by adding the root for male or female to the front of it. Thus to specify a male doctor, one would need to say nányīshēng (男醫生). Under normal circumstances both male and female doctors would simply be referred to as yīshēng. Spoken Chinese also has only one third-person pronoun, tā for all situations (though -men 們 / 们 can be added as a plural suffix). Tā can mean he, she, or it in any case. However, the different meanings are written with different characters: "他", containing the human radical "亻", for he, or a person of undetermined gender; "她", containing the female radical "女", for she; and "它" for it. Despite this, there is no "he/she" issue in Chinese, because pronouns are usually implied from context, and replacing "她" with "他" causes no grammatical conflict. It should be noted that the character for "she", containing the 'woman' radical (glyphic element of a character's composition), was invented in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century due to western influence; prior to this, the character indicating "he" today was used for both gender pronouns--it contains the 'person' radical, which, as noted above, is not gender-specific. Likewise there exists a written female form for you, 妳. In written Cantonese, the third-person singular pronoun is keui5, written as 佢; it may be used to refer to people of either gender. The practise of replacing the "亻" radical with "女" (forming the character 姖) to specifically indicate the female gender may also be seen occasionally in informal writing; however, this is neither widely accepted nor grammatically or semantically required, and, unlike 佢, the character 姖 has a separate meaning in standard Chinese.[1] Japanese
Japanese has no grammatical gender and number. Thus, isha (医者) can mean one or many male doctors, one or many female doctors, or many male and female doctors. Another example of the lack of European-style gender in language is the using of compound characters. The 'sha' in geisha (芸者, art person) and 'ja' in ninja (忍者, sneaking person) are the same character. Pronouns are generally avoided unless the meaning is unclear. The word "kare", grammatically a noun, is conventionally used in English teaching materials to translate the English word "he"; however, unlike English "he", it is seldom used in actual Japanese conversation, it is more of a literary word. The same happens with "kanojo", literary for "she". "Kanojo" is used in conversation, but mainly in the sense of "girlfriend", not "she". The plural of "kare", "karera" (彼ら) may also refer to groups of females, and is preferable to the rather demeaning (彼女達, "those women" or "girlfriendfolk"). Gender neutral language modification advocates suggest avoiding "karera" by instead using "those people" (あの人達, ano hito-tachi), which they praise as gender neutral, grammatical and natural-sounding. It should be noted though that until the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century, kare (彼) was used for both genders; kanojo (彼女) meant "girlfriend", as it still does. In general, Japanese, unlike European languages, has no grammatical gender, although certain words and expressions semantically refer specifically to males or specifically to females (such as haha "mother", bijin "beautiful woman", kakkou ga ii "is handsome"). However, the language spoken by Japanese women is markedly different from the speech of Japanese men in terms of vocabulary, use of grammar and idiom, pronunciation etc. An increasing number of Japanese avoid the traditional common terms for [your] wife (奥さん)and [your] husband (ご主人) which literally mean "the person inside" and "the master". Japanese custom has also dictated that women are expected to use a polite form of language keigo in more situations than men. This expectation has diminished more among urban young Japanese in the past decade. The major issues with regarded to gendered language in Japanese are overall speech patterns. There exists a "woman's language" ('onna kotoba') and "man's language" ('otoko kotoba'). Women's speech has different sentence endings than that of men, especially in non-polite speech. (Polite speech tends to be less differentiated, with male speech becoming more similar to female). A good example is the gender-neutral use of 'watashi' or 'watakushi' for 'I' in polite speech. In informal speech, women are still more likely to use 'watashi' or 'atashi', while men use 'boku', 'ore' or 'washi'. Women's speech is characterized by sentences ending with 'wa' (rising intonation) and by dropping the verbs 'da' or 'desu' (meaning "is"). Male speech never drops the word 'da' in a sentence. The differences are quite intricate, but very persistent, and there is little or no movement in Japan to change male/female speech patterns, since changes can sound awkward or confusing. However some historians note that over time Japanese as a whole has become more feminine. Words like money, 'kane', were never used by men casually with the honorific prefix 'o' before recent times. Today 'okane' is standard Japanese and is used by men in non-polite situations, something unthinkable 100 years ago. KoreanKorean, like a few other East Asian languages such as Japanese, does not use pronouns in everyday language, because the meaning is clear in the context. In case of confusion, there are pronouns to clarify the position, but normally the actual subject (person) is used rather than the pronoun. As for job titles, these are not gender-specific. Again, the meaning is normally clear in the context. TagalogTagalog, like other Philippine languages, is gender neutral; pronouns do not even have specific genders. However, Tagalog has had over three centuries of Spanish influence. So, gender is usually differentiated in certain Spanish loanwords by way of -o (masculine) and -a (feminine). These words mostly refer to ethnicities, occupations, and family. Some examples are: Pilipino/Pilipina (Filipino/a), Pinoy/Pinay (nickname for a Filipino person) Amerikano/Amerikana (American), tindero/tindera (vendor), inhinyero/inhinyera (engineer), tito/tita (uncle/aunt), manong/manang (elder brother/sister), and lolo/lola (grandfather/grandmother). An exception to this would be presidente (president) which, unlike in Spanish, refers to either a male or a female. TamilTamil has a gender-neutral form for the third-person plural, which is also used for the third-person singular in all formal communication. Most job titles are derived from this form as they are mostly used in a formal context. They are thus gender-free. TurkishTurkish is a gender neutral language, as most other Turkic languages. Nouns are in generic form and for both males and females and this generic form is used. For example: Doktor (doctor), eczacı (pharmacist), mühendis (engineer) etc. The Turkish equivalent for he, she and it is o. For example:
There are a few exceptions, where it is mandatory to provide gender (because of the nature of the foreign word origins):
There are very minor exceptions, which are constructed from native Turkish words after 1900s:
However, there is an alternative gender neutral use for words like these, which becomes more popular since 2000s:
See also
References
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