Talk:Gender neutrality in genderless languages

English and the constructed languages
I suggest that the main-article referral for English, and the discussions of Esperanto and Interlingua, be moved here from Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender, for the following reason:

English, Esperanto, and Interlingua are all genderless languages since (1) the article genderless language says "A genderless language is a natural or constructed human language that has no category of grammatical gender" (italics added); and (2) the article grammatical gender defines this term as "In linguistics, grammatical genders are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words." By these definitions, English, Esperanto, and Interlingua are all genderless languages. So all of these should be here rather than in Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender. 75.183.96.242 (talk) 16:52, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I've gone ahead and done so for Esperanto, but I don't know too much of Interlingua to know where it belongs. Go ahead and be bold. — D. Wo. 14:36, 10 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Not true for English, because personal pronouns change according to the gender of the associated noun. (The situation is the same for Dutch, at least as far as the distinction betrween masculine and feminine is concerned.)---Ehrenkater (talk) 14:40, 10 July 2012 (UTC)


 * I've ripped English out; Ehrenkater is 10^10^100% correct that English is most definitely not "genderless"; gender may be somewhat vestigial, but there are still vestiges of it - that's why "gender neutrality" in English tends to avoid using "he" or "she". I've also clarified what a "genderless language" is in the lede. Guy Harris (talk) 05:33, 1 April 2015 (UTC)


 * By genderless, what is meant is a lack of specifically grammatical gender. English does not have grammatical gender, so it is genderless. I am updating the article. If you have any disputes, please discuss them here.--Beneficii (talk) 10:26, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * English is not even grammatically genderless. I agree with Ehrenkater. It does use three pronouns he, she, it and plural, which are mostly semantically based, for its agreement system. The so-called gender neutrality has its place in a language only if it has sex-based pronouns and occupation/title lexemes, as it tries to remove these from the language. 108.7.185.47 (talk) 03:30, 6 December 2017 (UTC) [Hartmut Teuber] 22:40 EST, 5 December 2017


 * I'd define linguistic "genderless" (as opposed to semantic) as lacking an agreement system between words via pronouns, morphemes, or both means. These may be semantically motivated, often by sex, but sexless agreement systems do exist in some languages, such as +human, -human, +animate, -animate, and those based on visual properties, such as classifiers and points in the space in front of the body in signed languages of the deaf. For example, American Sign Language is not genderless, because it uses spatial points and classifiers for agreement between nouns and verbs. Sex-based lexemes and morphemes, as often used in titles, occupations, and family relations are something else, for which I don't use to discuss "genderless languages". They are only relevant if they require grammatical agreement with other parts in the same or neighboring sentences. 108.7.185.47 (talk) 03:13, 6 December 2017 (UTC) [Hartmut Teuber] 22:40 EST, 5 December 2017

I added a section some will find silly, but I think most would agree that programming and markup languages have at least as significant an influence as the other "constructed" languages cited. I would suggest considering the title "artificial languages" maybe?

Feminist errors
"Wo-man in English denotes an outcropping, or outgrowth of man..." Who wrote this? No. Just... no. It doesn't. Woman comes from wifman. Wif meant female or wife in OE and man meant person. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:C:AD80:8AD:A096:A63:15F1:C3B0 (talk) 03:27, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Interlingua
Is Interlingua really not sexist? I couldn't find any Interlingua translation for "sibling", only for "brother" and "sister". --JopV (talk) 16:38, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Lojban and Láadan
Would it be right to include these languages as genderless ones? Also, Toki Pona. 86.165.130.43 (talk) 21:13, 1 July 2015 (UTC) 86.165.130.43 (talk) 22:32, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

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All the examples in the Lead should be removed
All of the examples in the lead sentence should be removed. The statement that This is typically achieved by using gender-exclusive words ("human being", "person", "businessperson", "caveperson"; "people", "businesspeople", "cavepeople", and so on)... smacks of original research, for starters. The body of the article uses few of these, and the Lead is only supposed to be a summary of the article. Furthermore, where they do appear in the body, there are no references. Secondly, English is not a genderless language, so it does not make sense to illustrate genderless nouns by choosing a gendered language, if genderless languages are the issue and not genderless expressions in gendered languages. I think the examples could either be removed and not replaced, or replaced with a small number of examples from some genderless languages, although that will be less useful to an English readership, but perhaps would be helpful, especially if there are wiktionary entries for them, that can be linked and consulted by interested readers. Mathglot (talk) 03:34, 2 December 2017 (UTC)
 * ✅ Mathglot (talk) 09:45, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Definition is wrong
The definition in the first sentence is wrong: Gender neutrality in genderless language is the use of wording in those languages that avoids referring specifically to the male or female gender. No, it has nothing to do with the use of wording that avoids referring to gender. Rather, it is the fact that nouns in the language don't have gender, and therefore there is no grammatical accord between adjectives and nouns due to gender; and secondly, even words referring to people don't refer to gender, and you have to add additional words (equivalents of "male" or "female", "man" or "woman") to specifically call out what gender the person is. Mathglot (talk) 08:23, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Good points. What do you suggest? AnaSoc (talk) 00:27, 1 April 2018 (UTC)


 * For starters, I've removed the definition. Having no definition is better than having a wrong one. Mathglot (talk) 09:49, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Original research
The article is shot through with original research and unsourced assertions. This is understandable, because everybody feels like an expert in their native language (and sometimes, in others as well). However, Wikipedia's core principle of verifiability is clear on this point: All material in Wikipedia mainspace, including everything in articles, lists and captions, must be verifiable, and that Any material that needs a source but does not have one may be removed.

I plan to start removing content that is unsourced. This may mean large chunks of text, including perhaps whole subsections like Estonian or Finnish, or the entire Finno-Ugric languages section, as well as any other material that is unsourced, or invalidly sourced.

Please be sure when adding text to the article, that you include valid, reliable sources from secondary sources that substantiate the claims. Mathglot (talk) 10:01, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

A neutrality issue?
I will begin with the example of this: “gender-related stereotypes” to generalize this subject In my humble opinion, in this example, “stereotype” is not neutral, it suppose that the presupposed ideas about gender are wrong: is “using masculine pronouns when referring to persons by their occupations” wrong? I don't think so, this is just how languages evolve, if this is wrong, then, a bunch of languages are wrong, do we have to change each languages for an ideology, because that's what it's all about, this kind of non-neutral considerations in this article are there to support the ideology of the so called “gender theory”. This is no surprise that this article miss sources, some part of it have just been written to support that ideology and that is where the neutrality issue is (once again, in my humble opinion). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:2788:1B8:A39:50D5:FC59:8BAE:3EA1 (talk) 00:00, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't take this polemic too seriously; "neutrality" should defer to scientific objectivity, and anthropological research on gender seems largely in accord with much of the content in the article and use of the terminology you problematize. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.125.173.118 (talk • contribs) 05:59, June 5, 2019 (UTC)

Neutrality here refers to a political/ideological stance
"You" is not "case neutral", it's unmarked for case. "Put" is not tense- or aspect-neutral, it's unmarked for tense and aspect. To refer to "wait-staff" as a replacement for "waiter" and "waitress" as gender-neutral is a misnomer that conflates political-motivated language prescription with linguistic description. The orthogonal term is "common gender". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 185.205.225.128 (talk • contribs) 09:19, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

Issue regarding Kurdish
While ew is a genderless pronoun, in Kurmanji, the oblique forms of ew are not; for example, navê wî is "his name", navê wê "her name". Anyone know of alternatives extant within the language? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.125.173.118 (talk • contribs) 05:59, June 5, 2019 (UTC)

What is this article actually about?
What is this article actually about? According to the lead, it's 1) about languages without grammatical gender 2) about these languages having a subset of gender-specific words and 3) about gender-neutrality in these languages. As for latter, it must be about the subset of gendered lexicon, thus how to speak gender-neutrally when it becomes necessary to speak about e.g. a parent when these languages only allow to say "father" or "mother". This is the only thing that makes sense to discuss under a page title "Gender neutrality in genderless languages". At least IMVHO. Otherwise, it is rather trivial to talk about absence of gender in the absence of gender.

But talking about absence of gender in the absence of gender is exactly what happens in several example sections, e.g. Armenian or Persian. These languages sure have a subset of gendered lexicon, but this is not even mentioned here. So actually, these are examples for point 1 only. The Tagalog data goes bit further to point 2, and even mentions how the originally predominantly ungendered word class of nouns, and the completely genderless word class of adjectives partially have acquired gender distinctions due to borrowing. But then, nothing is said about how gender neutrality is achieved in this language (or in Turkish, which likewise has a small subset of gender-specific pairs of nouns).

As far as I can see, none of the examples discusses "Gender neutrality in genderless languages". Either they illustrate lack of gender in genderless languages (duh!), or marginal (natural) gender distinctions in basically genderless languages. Ok, one exception is English, but then, we have the main article Gender neutrality in English.

So I wondered if might not have thrown out some unsourced babies with the bathwater in last year's cleanup. Guess what, except for small unsourced bits about Basque and Esperanto pronoun-reformers, it was just as pointless as in the current version.

Have I missed something, or is my understanding of what this article actually should convey (without doing so) totally off the mark? If not: any ideas for a redirect target where this concept can hibernate until someone comes up with some substantial (and sourced!) material about this topic? –Austronesier (talk) 19:55, 25 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Ha ha, it's completely pointless and should be relegated to the dust bin. (Maybe the purge cleared away enough cobwebs to make that easier to see.) Whatever the lead *says* the article is about should be taken with a grain of salt; or at least, it is of secondary importance. WP:Article title policy is clear: "The title indicates what the article is about and distinguishes it from other articles." If the current status shows a mismatch between the title and the content, then one of them has to change.
 * If the title is correct and this article is really about "Gender neutrality in genderless languages", then we can blank the content and replace it with:
 * For sections on languages that are actually genderless, like #Estonian, they are brief and tautological as there's not much to say about it. The only real content is in sections about languages that *aren't* genderless, and that is out of scope for the current title.
 * And if the content is "correct" and the title isn't, then the article needs to be renamed to whatever the content seems to be about. And points 1), 2), and 3) don't even seem to cohere very well, that is, I can't draw a single theme out of that; if we keep the content, then we should tag the article with template Unfocused. Even so, with an unfocused article, how could you possibly come up with a decent title?  Maybe, Kinship terms and pronouns in genderless languages or some such?
 * The only other issue I can think of that such an article might cover, is the translation issues that occur when translators are faced with rendering a somewhat or fully gendered language like English or French into a genderless one like Hungarian, and how to faithfully convey the author's intent. That's a legitimate topic for an article, and could/should be mentioned at Translation (or in its own article), but currently isn't. Mathglot (talk) 00:54, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

What’s up with Hungarian?
Should be on there. Lazlazlazlazlaz (talk) 12:54, 24 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Yes. Literally everything except family members are non-gendered. 79.122.79.194 (talk) 23:10, 19 October 2022 (UTC)