I’ve been helping my 72 year old bilingual (Spanish) mother come to terms with one of her nieces having transitioned.

She’s been remarkably progressive about it, but she did bring up some good questions that I didn’t have answers for.

(I have my own set of annoyances for pronouns in English. Using a third person plural for single individuals has been leading to confusion, especially amongst my English L2 friends and family. But pronouns are some of the most conservative parts of speech in any language so I’m not going to tilt at that particular windmill. )

As a question for my LGBTQ+ kith, what have you been seeing/using as pronouns in different languages? Romantic languages are generally still heavily gendered, as are some Germanic. Does that interfere with non-binary language patterns? What about Turkish, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, etc?

Have there been any instances of novel pronouns created?

And, not to pry open old wounds, but has anybody noticed new slurs or other intentionally hurtful epithets?

The first question is an effort to answer questions that I hadn’t even thought to ask. I’m actually pretty proud of the older generation making an effort to live in the modern world.

The rest is pure personal curiosity and possible conversation material.

Huge thank you to everybody taking time out of their day to answer.

6 points

In Icelandic we have the neopronoun “hán”, which I know some nonbinary folk here use regularly. I’m not a native speaker so I can’t properly evaluate how awkward it is, and I’ve definitely seen grumbling from natives about how it doesn’t feel natural, but to me as a learner it feels completely reasonable and fits into the rather complicated grammar of Icelandic perfectly.

Just like how English distinguishes between subject/object/possessive for pronouns (I/me/my, he/him/his, she/her/her, they/them/their), Icelandic has 4 cases for nouns and pronouns. Hán behaves exactly like a regular neuter noun when inflected, declining like “hán/hán/háni/háns” for each of Icelandic cases. Compare the regular neuter word borð (table), which declines like “borð/borð/borði/borðs”.

Adjectives also decline for gender in Icelandic, but as you may have guessed nonbinary folk predominantly use the neuter gender, which agrees with the pronoun hán. There of course already existing a third person neuter pronoun in Icelandic, “það”, but its meaning is more like the English “it” and most people prefer understandably to not to go by it.

Also interesting but not pronouns is how Icelanders use names. Basically Icelanders don’t have a family name the way most other western countries do (… with exceptions), their last name is instead the name of their father, in possessive, plus -son or -dóttir. So if you are the son of your father, Einar, your last name would be Einarsson, literally “Einar’s son”. If you were the daughter of Einar, your last name would be Einarsdóttir, literally “Einar’s daughter”. This system of surnames is called patronymic surnames, and recently there has been more matronymic surnames as well – for example former football player Heiðar Helguson’s mother would have been called Helga, and his last name means “Helga’s son”.

This is of course problematic for nonbinary people who do not wish to use either -son or -dóttir, but recently it was allowed to use the neuter ending -bur instead, which repurposes an archaic word meaning “son” but is just used to mean a gender neutral “child” nowadays.

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11 points

Adding the Portuguese experience, I’ve seen the more inclusive communities within Portugal replaces the “o” and “a” vowels in gendered words with “e”, i.e. todos/todas becomes todes, amigos/amigas becomes amigues, etc.

For pronouns, there’s currently 3 sets of different gender-neutral pronouns I’ve seen used or in circulation. One is to drop the gendered vowel that terminates the pronoun, i.e. ele/ela becomes el, dele/dela becomes del. This still does have some ambiguity, so I’ve seen a greater adoption of pronouns that I’ve heard come from Latin roots. The two variants I’ve seen more often adopted are ele/ela → elu and ele/ela → ilu.

These gender-neutral pronouns are still not widely used outside inclusive communities, but I’ve heard of individual cases of wider adoption. I think I’ve heard of a book that was printed by a major publisher that for the first time used gender-neutral pronouns in its translation, and you start seeing some places use these pronouns in place of gendered pronouns in signs.

In more traditional media it’s still not common, but if they need to, what they tend to use is gender avoidant language, that explicitly avoids using pronouns or gendered names, for example, to replace ele/ela with “esta pessoa”, as “pessoa” is one of a few nouns that can be used that does not imply gender. But it isn’t easy to avoid gendered words and pronouns for a long period of time, and what I’ve heard from a few translator friends is that this is a complex and tiresome process as each sentence needs to be very carefully constructed, instead of the much easier process of the newer but still not widely adopted gender-neutral pronouns.

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13 points
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As a native Finnish speaker I can say that picking pronouns in Finnish is easy: there’s no grammatical gender, so no gendered pronouns either. On top of that, in colloquial Finnish we tend to use “it” for people too

Edit: as a random side note, in colloquial Finnish (at least in the South) “he/she” or hän is often used to refer to pets, and “it” or se is used for people, unless you’re being sarcastic. I find this hilarious and inexplicably adorable

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7 points

This page should anwser all your things

https://pronombr.es/

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4 points

In french people have started using “iel” which is as close of an equivalent to “they” that we can get in our gender-filled language. Its a mix between the male and female pronouns “il” and “elle”.
Maybe its just that im not as used to it as using they in the singular form, but its not as great. It is a step in the right direction though, its just that everything around the pronoun in the language is gendered.

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9 points

The issue with French is that, even if you use a kinda not gendered pronoun, the entire language is still heavily gendered.

If you use “iel” then what does follow? Masculine, feminine, or the kinda neutral inclusive writing using a dot? For me that’s where the biggest friction is, because the solution is harder to find than inventing new pronouns.

For non French speakers, the sentence “he is nice” would be translated as “il est gentil” and the sentence “she is nice” would be translated as “Elle est gentille”

Now, how do we write “they are nice”

  • iel est gentil (masculine)
  • iel est gentille (feminine)
  • iel est gentil.le (neutral inclusive)

So yeah, that’s really complicated because the language is clearly not created with that in mind.

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5 points

« La rédaction épicène » is the strategy of writing French while avoiding gender specific forms, but it’s a delicate art and a constant struggle. One of my colleagues tried to get ChatGPT to write in this way to no avail.

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2 points
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This is something that’s been driving me nuts. I’ve found lots of material on the concepts of “iel” and la rédaction épicène, but I can’t find many long-form examples for understanding how to actually use them. Any thoughts on where I could find articles or essays written without gender?

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4 points

Thats exactly right.
You can try to avoid gendered language, but you sentences get even longer and its basically a minefield

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