I’ve been watching an interview in English and a Dutch person had “they/them” after their name. This made me wonder, since in both German and Dutch “she” and “they” are the same pronoun. What would someone like them put in their signature in Dutch? “Het”? “Ze (pl.)”?

20 comments

  1. No working solution in German yet. They have to tell you themselves how they want to be addressed.

  2. In Dutch it’s mostly hen/hun or die/diens.
    But its not a usual thing to say for us due to grammar, so it takes a while to get used to it because in the beginning it just sounds weird.
    But I do think we should absolutely do it though.

    Edit: “Het” is an absolute no go. It is a very rude thing to say to a person in Dutch.

  4. They don’t have a solution. Italian is a gendered language and it doesn’t have a neutral gender. You always decline a noun according to the gender and the number, also in plural forms.

  5. Sweden has ‘hen’ (han/hon/hen). A lot of people use it. Then again, if you want to know how a gender-neutral person wants you to address them then just ask. 🙂

  6. Acceptance of non-binary gender identity or pretty much anything relating to minority gender/sexual identities is minimal in Latvia so this isn’t a widely discussed question but it’s been noted that any gender-neutral pronoun would be extremely difficult to use in Latvian. The language uses gender a lot and grammatical agreement applies to both subjects and objects. Not only adjectives but also verbs, numerals and even people’s names change form depending on the gender so constructing any non-trivial gender-neutral sentence in Latvian is a challenge.

    Most articles on the subject are along the lines of “we should not let this modern insanity erode our language” but the few references I can find to what people actually prefer, they seem to pick one gendered form and stick with that because the other options appear worse, even while using “they/them” in English. The Latvian version of using “they” would be going with “viņi” but that doesn’t work – “viņi” is strictly plural, with no history of a singular use, and using “viņi” as singular results in very confusing sentences. Using a new gender-neutral pronoun doesn’t solve anything because it’s just one word and everything else in a sentence would still retain the problem.

  7. In Spanish, “ella” is she and “él” is he, the usual gender neutral term created for non-binary folks “elle”

    Similarly, if you are referring to a group of only women, you would call them “ellas/nosotras” (they/we but feminine), but a group of men, or even when all are women except one man, would be “ellos/nosotros” (they/we but masculine). This has been receiving backlash recently for being a sexist linguistic rule and people are starting to use “elles/nosotres” to refer to groups of more than one gender.

  8. They don’t, everyone is called the same pronouns, as they are not gendered here! Makes things easier.

  9. Hen/den I’d guess but I’ve never really let anyone doing this in Sweden, even being part of unions, anarchist and leftist communities. I’m sure there’s a few out there but it really doesn’t seem to be an issue.

  10. I know Grey Violet used (or uses) “ono”, meaning “it”. It isn’t as disrespectable as “it”/”es”/”het”, since Russian is a gendered language where inanimate objects can be masculine, feminine or neuter, so a neuter animate object isn’t viewed as inanimate.

    Some younger genter-neutral Russians use “oni”, meaning “they”, which is an obvious English calque and sounds weird to me, since it sounds more like royal plural than gender-neutral plural.

  11. I can’t say I’ve ever met a “gender-neutral person”, I guess it must be an American fad that hasn’t really caught on here

  12. I think an aspect of your question is “in your country’s official language(s)”, because people can of course also use other languages.

    There’s two non-binary folks in my friend circle.

    * In Greek, they went with the neuter grammatical gender agreement, which grammatically does not work very well because the semantics of the neuter grammatical gender in Greek are (a) inanimate (main use) or (b) diminutive animate (secondary use).

    * In English, the singular they. Not even a doubt about it.

    * In German, I don’t know about one of the two, the other recommends “keine”, as in “refer to me by name when possible”.

    For German and Greek, but not for English, the challenge is much more complex because it’s not a matter of just pronouns (which, by its vary nature, can be replaced with nouns and easily offer an appropriate solution). Adjectives (both languages), articles before proper names (Greek and Southern German) and participles (only Greek) also exhibit grammatical gender agreement. In the absence of a neuter noun in the immediate context, it’s extremely hard to grammatically license the secondary meaning of the neuter grammatical gender (diminutive animate).

    Language changes, and that change happens during the acquisition of the first language in childhood. For us grownups, these new linguistic styles will always not sound very grammatical (in the same way that my parents generation cannot really fathom how many intransitive Greek verbs became transitive in the speech of my generation).

    Not all proposed language changes are learnable, the process of childhood language acquisition is also a hotbed of regularisation of grammatical phenomena that became irregular over time. There, the English singular they for a specific referent got so extremely lucky, because it is a regularisation – the language was begging for that change to happen, so to speak. The Greek neuter for a non-diminutive animate referent will be facing an uphill platform, and it might not be a learnable language change.

    EDIT: bit of readability improvements

  13. The only gender neutral person I have heard of uses neutrum. Czech is a very gendered language, up to the point that you have to use it in reference to yourself in certain situation, such as polite forms ( “may I’) and past tense. So if you wish to be taken for a gender neutral person, you have to engage in major grammar gymnastic yourself, not just everyone around you.

    So, neopronouns are very hard to use even for the person demanding it and “it” is not quite a person-person pronoun… so people who demand gender neutral reference are thin on the ground.

  14. I only know one such person and they generally ask to have their pronouns mixed.

    Slovene can do the ‘they/them’ thing, but it used to be reserved for nobility before mostly dying out from spoken language. It currently sounds incredibly silly for use of gender neutral people, it would take years to take hold.

  15. I have no idea. Grammatically correct way would be ‘tai’, but it is not really used for human beings.

  16. The one non-binary person I know uses “they” in English but sticks with their assigned pronouns in Polish, since the neuter grammatical gender we do have is used for inanimate objects and it feels dehumanizing to them.

  17. Same as anyone else ”Hän” but in reality everyone uses ”Se” which means ”It”. It just feels more fuent so it’s very common in spoken language to do this.

    Finnish is grammatically genderless so everyone has the exact same pronouns. Makes me happy to know i completely dodge the pronoun issue and will never accidentally make someone feel bad.

  19. Turkish, Armenian and Georgian have no gender whatever.

    Their speakers’ attitudes to gender issues are not otherwise distinguishable from those of neighbouring speakers of Abkhaz, Arabic, Greek and Russian, which all do have gender. So much for using syntax as a tool for social change.

  20. In greece we have a neutral gender, but it wouldn’t be proper to use it for a human being. It would be like in English calling someone as “it”.

    I’m not sure what the solution is. In fact I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t prefer to be called either “he” or “she” :\

Leave a Reply
You May Also Like