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Concept
Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns
Summary
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological sex. Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender.
In languages with pronominal gender, problems of usage may arise in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown social gender is being referred to but commonly available pronouns are gender-specific. Different solutions to this issue have been proposed and used in various languages.
Gender neutrality in genderless languages
Many languages of the world (including most Austronesian languages, many East Asian languages, the Quechuan languages, and the Uralic languages) do not have gender distinctions in personal pronouns, just as most of them lack any system of grammatical gender. In others, such as many of the Niger–Congo languages, there is a system of grammatical gender (or noun classes), but the divisions are not based on sex. In Swahili, for example, the independent third person pronoun yeye 'he/she' can be used to refer to a male or female being. What matters in this case is that the referent belongs to the animate class (i.e humans or non-human animals) as opposed to an inanimate class. Since pronouns do not distinguish the social gender of the referent, they are considered neutral in this kind of system.
Grammatical gender#Contextual determination of gender and Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender
In other languages – including most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages – third-person personal pronouns (at least those used to refer to people) intrinsically distinguish male from female.
Official source
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