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.
For Spanish, contrary to what conservatives say, the “white liberals in California” did not invent what we call inclusive language/pronouns. The @ and the X were being used by people like me some 20 years ago, within Latin American communities.
Yeah, it’s really infuriating seeing people act like this stuff is new. I grew up in south america, a couple of blocks from a state Faculty of Psychology, the student body was like 80% female and there was a strong presence of feminist advocacy groups (regular marches, public events, ever-present banners and posters, etc). I remember reading signs using “TOD@S” or “TODXS” decades ago.
It’s complicated in German. Almost every noun being gendered brings up a bunch of issues unknown to the English speaking world, long before we get to the topic of non-binary folks.
Just imagine every job description, occupation and whatnot being gendered, with male being the default. In English this is rare nowadays, in German it’s baked into the language. A doctor and a doctoress, a maypr and a mayoress, a student and a studentess, a cyclist and a cyclistess.
The feminist movement has been trying to find solutions for this for decades, they are fairly controversial among older conservative folks, and admittedly inelegant.
Concerning non-binary folks it gets even more complicated. Not only does referring to almost any description automatically infer a binary gender, we also don’t have any option for unspecified pronouns other than “it”, which is hugely dehumanizing. The equivalent of “they” is already used as a honorific.
Some people tried introducing neopronouns but they never took off. Most enbies I know simply chose the binary pronoun they are the least uncomfortable with and stick with that.
In the US press, there was some coverage of the sier/xier body of neo pronouns for enby people. Are those the ones you mention that didn’t catch on?
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
I’m not a native speaker, but I’ve studied Japanese for more than a decade. There are no singular, non-gendered third person pronouns, so there is no equivalent of a singular they. Although there is an equivalent of a plural they, it’s not completely gender neutral. The equivalent of him is kare, and the equivalent of her is kanojo. You can make them plural by ending “ra” on to the end of them. Kanojora is used only for groups of women/girls, and karera can be used for a group of men/boys, or a mixed-gender group. That makes the root meaning of karera male coded even if it’s used in a gender neutral manner, so non-binary people might prefer not to use that.
This shouldn’t however be a major issue for Japanese speakers, as first person pronouns are the only ones that are in frequent use. Unlike English, where you use pronouns to avoid repitition, you can completely omit them in Japanese, so instead of asking “Has Asami done her homework?” in English, you would ask “Has Asami done homework?” It’s also preferable to use names instead of 2nd/3rd person pronouns. Instead of asking “How about you?”, you’d ask “How about (person’s name)?” It’s probably much easier for a non-binary person to ask that no pronouns be used for them
As you say, in casual conversation, the subject is often implied after its introduction. So after asking “How is Tomoko?” if you say, “Got yelled at by the boss again?”, your listener would know that you would be asking about Tomoko’s situation, without saying she get yelled at. In English it tends to default to you or I.
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.
