Talk:Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 30 August 2021 and 8 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Kaashvi Agarwal.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:08, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Section overview - Needs citations
I will be modifying the overview section of the article. It only has one citation at the moment of writing this. I will try to find resources to support the statements in the section, but I will have to remove and modify several parts. Also, I will change some of the given examples to Spanish since I am fluent in Spanish, and I feel more comfortable finding resources in Spanish. Besides that, I will do my best to keep all the topics mentioned in the overview section, but I will be adding citations. --Edpe77 (talk) 07:30, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

German: Das Kellner?
Years ago I had heard that one of the German governments (Don't remember: East? West?) had made a move in the 1970s to change professions to neuter, in order to desex them. I'd hear the term "Das Kellner" and "Das Lehrer" thrown around, but can't find reference any more. Has anyone else heard this? samwaltz 04:16, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Artificial languages
Quite a number of artificial languages stil have the echoes of gender. I took the second paragraph of my update directly from the page Esperanto and Ido compared. It looks like it is a perfect fit with the article, which is not explicitly limited to natural languages. samwaltz 00:35, 4 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi. I understand that there is a connection, but it seems to me that it's very arguable whether any of the languages you mentioned has true grammatical gender -- see an objection here. For this reason, I placed the artificial languages at Gender-neutrality in languages without grammatical gender some time ago.
 * You can always use the text you've added to enrich the Constructed Languages section of the other article... FilipeS 12:40, 4 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Ergh... Well, I suppose there is the grey area as to what constitutes a gender; I generally maintain that any language that implements a distinction such that you know the state of someone's genitalia based on a descriptor other than "male" or "female" (or its immediate parallels) is still a gendered language - any language having separate words for sister and brother, for example. Basically, one of the objections of Ido, when it forked from Esperanto, was that, although claiming to be genderless, Esperanto still had a slightly gendered vocabulary. samwaltz 06:32, 5 February 2007 (UTC)


 * I suspect that, according to your definition, all natural languages mark gender. For example, they generally have different names for males and females. FilipeS 13:37, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

On second thoughts, I think I'm moving the Constructed Languages to this article. Although it's arguable whether we can speak of grammatical gender in their case, they were modelled after Indo-European languages, which typically do have gender, and so they belong to this group, at least in a genetic sense. FilipeS 22:56, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

German: "neologisms"
"In some cases, neologisms may be formed: some university communities are replacing Student (male college student) and Studentin (female college student) with the participle Studierende(r), meaning "the studying/college-going person", which does not face quite as many problems with declension"

"Studierende", which is not AFAIK particularly neologous (ha), means lit. someone who is studying. When I go drinking, technically I am no longer a "studierende" but still a "student".

Thus this illustrates a certain semantical distinction being thrown out of the window (knowingly/unknowingly) in the name of gender-neutrality and not so much a willingness to coin neologisms.

Swedish
"Swedish adjectives used to be inflected for gender as well". Gender (grammatical gender) is still a compulsory inflection category of Swedish adjectives. What is optional and likely to disappear is inflection of adectives for sex (semantic gender). Since grammatical gender in modern Swedish has nothing to do with male or female the description in the article is not good. 85.231.217.218 (talk) 20:03, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

English?
Why is English listed here instead of at Gender-neutrality in genderless languages? English clearly does not have grammatical gender. — D. Wo. 23:00, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Correct, and neither do the IALs Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua. On the other hand, at least English and Interlingua are not genderless languages either, as they do have personal gender (he, she, it; ille, illa, illo). (So do Esperanto and Ido, I think.) So maybe the word "grammatical" should simply disappear from the title of this article? – McDutchie (talk) 10:00, 10 April 2009 (UTC)


 * The article genderless language says "A genderless language is a natural or constructed human language that has no category of grammatical gender." (Italics added.) 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, Ido, and Interlingua are all genderless languages even if we leave out the word "grammatical".  So all of these should be exclusively in Gender-neutrality in genderless languages.  Note that Ido, but not the others, is already there.  75.183.96.242 (talk) 16:37, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Removed.--Beneficii (talk) 11:19, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Section on hindi needed
Bob A (talk) 06:34, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Section of Spanish and German is too long
Since a separate article was already created, the current content can be summarized.

In the Spanish section, the la secretario example is a bit confusing. The gender of the article ad the word are not in agreement. Is that intentional? Sepideh (talk) 11:30, 25 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I significantly shortened the Spanish section so that it is now more of a summary of the full article. Linguist97 (talk) 05:03, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Section "Overview" - German example
"Note, however, the contrasting example in German, where the feminine gender supersedes the masculine in the plural; the phrase "die Frau und der Mann (the woman and the man) is replaced by the pronoun sie (they [feminine])."

This is incorrect as the German plural pronouns are gender-neutral, i.e. there is only one form for the plural of all three genders.

"Die Männer" (the men) would also be replaced by "sie". This makes it different from the French example, as in French there are two different forms: "ils" [masculine] and "elles" [feminine] (both personal pronoun plural nominative case).

Granted, the personal pronoun nominative and accusative case - i.e. "sie" - are homonym to the feminine singular nominative and accusative, which might lead to the assumption that the plural pronoun is technically feminine (The same applies to demonstrative pronouns and articles, notice "die Männer").

However the dative case - "ihnen" for the personal pronoun - is akin to the masculine singular accusative case "ihn".

Examples:

Die Frauen helfen den Männern. (The women help the men.) -> Sie helfen ihnen. (They help them.)

Die Männer helfen den Frauen. (The men help the women.) -> Sie helfen ihnen. (They help them.)

Etymology aside there is in present German no serious debate, that I know of, about the gender-neutrality of the plural pronouns. It seems to be just one of those peculiarities of German grammar that tend to confuse non-native speakers. A similar example would be the singular genitive and dative cases of the feminine article being "der" which is also the singular nominative case of the masculine article.

Example:

Der Ehemann der Frau starb letztes Jahr. (The woman's husband died last year)

BharatKulamarva (talk) 20:19, 18 April 2013 (UTC)


 * The formulation was incorrect and there's also no "serious debate", but the observation that the German plural is feminine (in some way) exists, i.e. plural forms often equal or are similar to feminine forms:
 * der Mann, er (sg., m.) - die Männer, sie (pl.)
 * die Frau, sie (sg., f.) - die Frauen, sie (pl.)
 * -93.196.227.10 (talk) 17:30, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

German: "cannot" is more like "must not" on signs, regulations...
If there is any regulation in English, "You cannot swim here (the current is too strong)" it actually means that swimming is forbidden there (just expressed a little less harshly). "You cannot smoke here! (= due to explosive chemicals nearby, you might cause the building to blow up by just one spark)". But in fact, albeit only "forbidden by common sense", it is forbidden after all. So that's why in German, you ought to translate the "cannot" (in nearly all cases) by "Sie dürfen hier nicht..." or "Man darf hier nicht...". This is a general rule, which may (mainly in spoken language) have its exceptions from time to time: "Sie können hier nicht parken, mein Herr!" might be a strong advice if you've tried to park your car near a higher-class hotel exactly where the firemen will need to exit in case of a fire. However, it means that it is not allowed to park here. But the doorman (porter in Britain) would rather use können nicht instead of dürfen nicht due to his employer's code of politeness. Still, it does not mean that it will always make sense in everyday language as well. -andy 77.191.218.155 (talk) 13:38, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Neutrality for genderqueer people?
I notice that this article has a good deal about grammatical gender and its relation to male/female distinctions. But is there any information on how gendered languages deal with people who are genderqueer? 75.88.45.82 (talk) 18:48, 16 March 2014 (UTC)


 * In case of German there are forms like "Lehrer_in", "Lehrer*in" which some claim to be completely gender-neutral while feminists forms like "LehrerIn" are sexists and emphasize a male-female bipolarity. There might also be forms like "Leh_rerin" with a "replaced" underscore. But anyway: _ and * are rare and only used by the politically left. -93.196.227.10 (talk) 17:21, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

German participles
"some university communities are replacing Student (grammatically male college student) and Studentin (female college student) with the nominalized participle Studierende(r), meaning "the studying person" (male with the "r", female without), which does not face quite as many problems with declension." -93.196.227.10 (talk) 17:21, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
 * "male with the "r", female without" -- that's (kind of) wrong. It's "der Studierende" (masculine/male) and "ein Studierender" (masculine/male), but "die Studierende" (feminine/female) and "eine Studierende" (feminine/female), so it can be masculine/male even though there's no "r" ("der Studierende").
 * "which does not face quite as many problems with declension" -- that's correct, it's easy to decline, but other (well-known) problems arise:
 * "Nominalizations" of participles such as Studierender and Lehrender do often refer to other people than Student and Lehrer do. E.g. somebody studing some old book (e.g. the Bible) is a "Studierender", but not necessarily a "Student" (someone studying at an university etc.).
 * "Studenten" aren't always "Studierende" (people who study ATM), sometimes they are e.g. "Schlafende" (people who sleep ATM) or "Feiernde" (people who party ATM). Also "sterbende Studenten" (dying students) makes sense, but "sterbende Studierende" (dying people who study ATM - i.e. people who study and die at the same time) is awkward.

Spanish and Portuguese on same topic?
Why are both on same topic? The changes presented to Spanish makes no sense in Portuguese. There are ways make Portuguese sound gender-neutral, but they are either the use of extreme generic language or the use of foreign symbols and syntax. The Spanish rules are not useful for a Portuguese speaker. --189.90.187.242 (talk) 18:03, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Gender neutral pronouns in French
"For gender-neutral pronouns, "elli" and "yel" are common, with the same conjugation as il / elle / on, and "yels", with the same conjugation as ils / elles.[4]"

This is absolutely wrong: that someone merely invented them does not make them common. A partisan website should not be used as a source. A) These pronouns are not the only proposition made. B) It's not the most prominent. ("ille(s)" is more common). C) Very few people have even heard about it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.215.94.125 (talk) 17:26, 4 October 2016 (UTC)


 * I agree, and have no idea why someone added this extremely obscure thing, much less tried to present it as "common". I have removed that line entirely. (Edit: The original addition was here on 2016-01-23) Thelo (talk) 06:00, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

As an update: "iel" and "iels" are gaining traction. They seem like the preferred gender-neutral pronoun, at least in leftist circles (probably in LGBT ones too). If anyone knows of good linguistic research papers on this... Pikrass (talk) 21:34, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

Does this need more citations?
This artical does not appear to cite many sources (if any) for most of its sections. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rebellaserbrain (talk • contribs) 23:41, 13 October 2016 (UTC)

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Major update needed for Romance languages
Spanish, Portuguese, etc., are seeing a now-common convention arise, in which masculine-used-as-generic is replaced with x. E.g., "Movimiento de usuarixs y trabajadorxs en defensa de la LNSM". For clarity, WP writing should use  (or ) markup to indicate this is a meta-syntactic variable. This will also make it clear to both editors and bots that it's not a typo to "correct".

I found out about this by encountering "usuarixs" in a WMF-related usergroup name and then Googling the word. It's all over the place, and similar constructions abound these days. From my quick and superficial digging, it seems most common in activism/advocacy writing, youth-culture material (both targeted at and authored by that segment), and left-leaning organizational statements. By now there's probably some RS material (I would look in Spanish first) on this practice and its origins.

I don't see any evidence that its being applied to words that do not apply to people (e.g., I'm not seeing "movimientx" to neutralize the grammatical gender applied to verbs, non-personal nouns, etc.)

My own Spanish is "just enough to get into trouble". Someone actually fluent could research this 10× faster and probably way more accurately, and may already have a better sense of Spanish and Latin American (or Italian, or Portuguese, or whatever) news sources' reliability than I do. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:11, 2 June 2018 (UTC) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:44, 3 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Not sure I see the applicability of var here, which is used more for math, and not language, where we might use sic instead. Also, my feeling when reading the new forms (which I was aware of) is not that they are a placeholder for something else, but rather, that they are an evolution to something new, or so their coiners would hope.  A placeholder would be looking backwards: something familiar goes in there that is not there; whereas these new formulations are forward-looking, and no "substitution" back to older forms is implied; rather, these new forms replace the old. Because of the widespread use of Spanish in the United States, the normal process of language contact  means that this is starting to be seen in English loanwords from Spanish as well, although in limited contexts.  To my mind this is really the bleeding edge at this point, and not sure how much Wikipedia needs to say about something that is evolving rapidly.  See also, "Latin@" (Latinx).  Occasionally, the 'X' migrates to leading position, at least when a similar-enough sound is involved, as in the case of "Chicano"; so you can have "Xicana" as in "Xicana literature", "Xicanisma".  Combining that with the trailing -x leads to the form Xicanx; see From Chicano to Xicanx: A brief history of a political and cultural identity. Mathglot (talk) 10:24, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
 * The HTML specs illustrate it being used for non-math and non-code, and we've been using it this way for over a decade (and the Web's been using it that way for way longer). What it's  used for is irrelevant.  I most use my car to drive around in town, but that doesn't make it inappropriate for a countryside trip. :-)  Using  would have no semantic markup value, only require way more work (either to use y, or to not hide it and then get into time-sucking debates on the talk pages about whether we're implying it's an error we're quoting, which is how [sic] is usually used and interpreted. Nice to know we already have some material, e.g. at Latinx, a page I hadn't seen (though I definitely like the look of the @ orthography better!). Oh, and I wasn't intending to imply anything socio-political or dismissive with the word "placeholder"; I was approaching the matter only in terms of the glyphic mechanics, of the string replacements, and (in turn) of markup about them.
 * I added this comment elsewhere, where SMcCandlish blew it off as being misplaced. So here it is again:
 * Is it standard to render the x in a different font than the rest of the text, the way your markup does? That formatting looks ugly, because fonts are not designed to mix in the middle of words like that so the kerning is wrong. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:07, 2 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Unless it is standard to italicize the x (and it seems that it is not), then we shouldn't do so: it is unnecessary, displays poorly, and is likely to create considerably more confusion ("why is one letter of this word italicized?"—or if it kerns badly enough, "what is this?") than you would hope to reduce. -sche (talk) 05:20, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

As a native Brazilian Portuguese and fluent Spanish speaker this is false. 177.132.45.74 (talk) 12:09, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

"Finnish has no gender markers in the language"
I think that's a little oversimplified -- it wasn't all that long ago, in language history terms, that the -tar/-tär suffix was basically required in more or less the same range of contexts as the German -in(n) suffix, and it still seems to occur in some words... AnonMoos (talk) 08:20, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Spanish and Portuguese
In section 5.4, bearing the same title as this talk page post, you forgot a few exceptions to the rule which says "words ending in -z are usually feminine", and I am talking about the words "lápiz" (pencil) and "pez" (fish), which end in -z but are masculine, "(el) lápiz", "(el) pez". --Fandelasketchup (talk) 12:55, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Académie Française
There's a good deal about the Académie Française's opinion on the French section, including a pretty long quote. I feel this should be balanced by contradictory sources. The Académie is decried a lot by professional linguists and researchers, who among other things point out their conservative and prescriptive view of the language. (Which is not a "bad thing" in a neutral encyclopedia of course, but it should be told for context.)

Also, the Académie and others have historically tried (and partially succeeded) to make female versions of certain job titles disappear. They also pushed to make the masculine the "neutral"/"default" gender, eg by changing accepted grammar rules that were more neutral towards genders. All this was for openly misogynistic reasons. That's also useful context for their current views on the matter. Pikrass (talk) 21:50, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I totaly agree, it should be adressed ! The French section of the article is not neutral and emphases to much on the Académie point of view which is quite conservative. And it should also be mentionned that the Académie has no power to impose whatsoever, so what they are saying doesnt have to be followed by the people and the government.
 * Plus, what is said in the section is moslty true for France, but much less for Belgium (and I suppose in Switzerland, etc. too, but as a Belgian, I can only speak for my contry) where the use of the language is often more progressive. Martin m159 (talk) 21:52, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

So, the wikipedia article is about gender neutrality. The french article is about feminisation. Those are two different topics and mixing them in the same article uselessely confusing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.176.159.21 (talk) 19:03, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Some remarks on the Hebrew section.
The flowing data is from my daily experience, from living in Hebrew speaking country, and mostly backed up by (1)

I'm not a wikipidian and therefor i will only put the information here for the future editing.

There are two more recent forms of writing that are inclusive for all genders. the one is using dots "." instead of slash "/", this is also used in case of non-binary people seeking for non-gendered way of writing.

The second one is combining both forms of the words into one word, this work mainly in plural case. The writing is very similar to the one with dots, but without the dot and the reading as follow.

kid(ילד) -> kids(females,ילדות), kids(males,ילדים) -> kids(inclusive, ילדים.ות), kids(inclusive, joined form,ילדימות/ילדיםות)

there is also two ways to write depend on the order of suffixes, e.g ילדים.ות or ילדות.ים, and ילדימות or ילדותים.

The joined form is readable (by reading the two suffixes), while in the other case it unclear the right why to read or if it even readable. As far as i know it is much more common to use the joined form on human related nouns (kids,peoples, teachers etc.) then on any other nouns and verbs. While in some times this form is only referring to non-binary people.

(1) https://hebrew-academy.org.il/

another less formal source (also in hebrew) can be this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.137.117.71 (talk) 11:12, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Non-Binary People
This article (along with many many other flaws) fails to mention much at all about how non-binary, genderless, and genderfluid people are considered. This feels like something reaaly notable that should be mentioned..... Nithin🚀 talk 02:30, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian Language
Part talking about Serbo-Croatian language has many problems. Let's just look at the example showing words for coach: masculine word is trener (Latin only script because I don't have Cyrillic keyborad) and in article it is written that feminine form is trenirka and it is written that it means female coach and track-suit, but it only means track-suit, feminine form of word trener is trenerica, same goes for profesorka which is incorrect: right form is profesorica, profesorka doesn't mean anything. Article also uses only Serbian vesion of some nouns: veštak is vještak in Croatian, this is also incorrect, vještak and vještakinja mean male/ female expert and vještac and vještica mean male/ female witch. Etiktov (talk) 19:37, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Grammatical gender in German
The article states: "Nouns referring to people are mostly masculine or feminine, corresponding to their sex."

As a native German speaker, I have to say: This is absolutely not true. The thing described here as "Grammatical Gender" is not called "gender", but "Genus" in German, because it is independent from the described persons gender. There's a footnote stating "Mädchen" (girl) as an example, but this is only the tip of the iceberg: Most German nouns are technically independent from their gender. There are "female" nouns used also for men ("Geschäftsführung", "Fachkraft", "Autorität" and many many others), there are "neutral" words used for all genders ("Mitglied") are "male" words used also for women (like "Gast", "Prüfling"). Most words for people that have a "male" genus however, can be turned into a female version which is actually gender-specific using the ending "-in" (similar to the English suffix "-ess"). This way, a "male" word will be used gender-neutrally (when talking about a group of people, an unknown person, the abstract concept of a social role, a non-binary person), but most commonly, when the gender is known, the gender-neutral version will be interpreted as male (similarly to the English word "actor").

In Germany, it is currently controversial whether women and non-binary people should be included into the male/neutral words (like in English, by calling women "actor" instead of "actress") or whether the neutral word should be turned into a male-only word, enforcing mentioning both forms ("Schauspielerinnen und Schauspieler", "actresses and actors") or a combination of those words ("Schauspieler:Innen", "act:ress") when referring to all genders. The latter approach is often described as "gender-inclusive language" or "gender-sensitive language", but it obviously is not gender-neutral. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Janopae (talk • contribs) 20:46, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Gender and Technoculture 320-01
— Assignment last updated by ACHorwitz (talk) 20:19, 8 March 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Psychology of Gender
— Assignment last updated by Zisha68 (talk) 02:34, 29 April 2024 (UTC)