I tried to think of a cute title, but to be honest, I didn't try very hard.
March 17, 2006 7:37 PM   Subscribe

In America, there's a trend towards making the English language more gender-neutral. However, it seems that English is already one of the world's more androgynous languages. Is there an effort to make other languages more gender-neutral, or is it just American English?
posted by Afroblanco to Writing & Language (50 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
On what do you base your assertion that English is already one of the world's less gender-specific languages? Farsi, for example, doesn't even differentiate between he and she in its pronouns.

Many gendered words in english are borrowings from other languages. Often, these are the words that get generalized (waiter & waitress --> waiter; actor & actress --> actor). I don't think of it as going from gendered to non-gendered, I think of it as going from specific to general.

The phenomenon I THINK you're talking about, though, involves things like "member of congress" instead of "congressman" or "chair" instead of "chairman". However, the same situation applies here. When these words came into use, women didn't hold the positions they reference. With sociological change comes linguistic change to match.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 7:54 PM on March 17, 2006


And romance languages don't require a gender-specific pronoun to accompany a verb. No need to say "he ran" or "she hopped." English is crappy that way. The big gender problems in English arise out of our stupid verbs that can't stand alone.
posted by JekPorkins at 8:00 PM on March 17, 2006


Well, I expect he bases his assertion on the fact that Latinate languages (eg French, Italian, Spanish) and many others (eg German) have gendered nouns. Farsi is not a particularly strong counterexample.
posted by unSane at 8:01 PM on March 17, 2006


Response by poster: Also, a corrolary to my initial question - is there a connection between the gender specificity of a language and the egalitarianism of it's speakers?
posted by Afroblanco at 8:03 PM on March 17, 2006


Porkins, what? Can you explain how you say 'he ran' or 'she hopped' in French, Spanish or Italian without a pronoun? In Latin, I grant you, there's no need for a pronoun, but... it's not really that widely spoken these days.
posted by unSane at 8:03 PM on March 17, 2006


Can you explain how you say 'he ran' or 'she hopped' in French, Spanish or Italian without a pronoun?

Corrio, brinco. JekPorkins is right. Romance language speakers often drop the pronoun altogether. So "He should read the FAQ" which requires a pronoun in English can easily become a genderless "Debe leer el FAQ."
posted by vacapinta at 8:12 PM on March 17, 2006


Yeah, but grammatical gender languages like German and French don't use "gender" in the same way English does.

A table can be male, female, or neuter gendered in French or German -- in English, gender generally refers to sex. Everything in a language like German has a gender -- tables, rocks, etc, and it's not really well tied to biological gender. JekPorkins example has to do with a lack of inflections for verbs in English (which is neither stupid or smart), but I don't think that does a hell of a lot, either.

I don't buy the argument that English is generally more androgynous without some better exposition.
posted by teece at 8:12 PM on March 17, 2006


unSane, in those languages, there's no need to specify "he" or "she" unless you want to. Example:

He ran in Italian: Ha corso.
She jumped in Italian: Ha saltato.

You can even have one-word sentences: Grida. (He or she screams)
posted by JekPorkins at 8:13 PM on March 17, 2006


Response by poster: Actually, the assertion that English is a relatively androgynous language is not the important part of my question. The central question is whether or not there is an effort to de-gender languages besides English. Also, as a corollary, whether or not speakers of more-androgynous languages have more equality between the sexes.
posted by Afroblanco at 8:23 PM on March 17, 2006


There are many languages which are much less gender-oriented than English. Recently I began to study Japanese (a bit) and I'm finding that in some ways it's a lot less gender-oriented.

In some ways it's more, most specifically in how pronouns are used, which is extremely complicated, and which I don't come even close to understanding the fine points. There are also gender-specific words for family relationships.

But there are also specific words which relate to age-differences. For instance, "onee" means "older sister" and "imouto" means "younger sister". "onii" means "older brother" and "otouto" means "younger brother".

A lot of formal titles are not gendered. The word "hakushaku" can variously be translated as "Count", "Earl", and "Countess". "Koushaku" means both "Duke" and "Duchess". "Danshaku" is both "Baron" and "Baroness". And one of my favorite words, "otaku", applies equally to boys, men, girls, and women. (It translates pretty well as "fanboy" and/or "fangrrl".)

As to gendered articles, Japanese doesn't have articles at all, so the question doesn't come up.

Compared to the other Germanic languages, and to the Romance languages, English contains much less in the way of gender-specification. But there's a lot more to the world than German and French and Spanish.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 8:26 PM on March 17, 2006


Yes but you can't do it in French. A couru and a sauté are just as wrong as saying ran or jumped without indicating who. In additon, JP, you cannot do it in Italian, Portuguese or Spanish unless it is very clear who ran, jumped, etc.

Teece, English does have gender beyond the biological. Ships (and sometimes other modes of transport) are assumed to be female as are cats, unless proved otherwise.

Languages such as Chinese don't have gender but I am not sure what this proves.

On the original topic, if we are talking about the chair/actor thing, at least in European languages, we are seeing more attempts at feminization. The French, particularly the French Canadians, have come up with a variety of female titles. Mairesse, for example, used to be a mayor's wife. It is now a female mayor. Maire, however, will be generic but, in practice, will be assumed to be male unless proved otherwise. An example in German is man, the equivalent of English one as in one does... where German feminists have been using frau (i.e. woman) for many years.

And, Afroblanco, as we are on a linguistic theme, forgive me for raising one of my usual bugbears, but it is its and not it's.
posted by TheRaven at 8:32 PM on March 17, 2006


In English it is quite possible to de-gender a sentence by turning it into the passive voice.'

He should read the FAQ --> The FAQ should be read.

It's ugly as hell, but it's quite possible.

Also 'they', 'someone' or 'one' can be substituted for 'he' or 'she' to conceal gender. 'They' works informally in the singular.

"What should someone do if they have a problem?"

"They should read the FAQ"

Here 'they' is clearly singular. Equivalently:

"What should one do if one has a problem?"

"One shoud read the FAQ".

So English doesn't require gender either, and in fact (as usual) provides a multitude of strategies for working around it.
posted by unSane at 8:35 PM on March 17, 2006


Well, I expect he bases his assertion on the fact that Latinate languages (eg French, Italian, Spanish) and many others (eg German) have gendered nouns. Farsi is not a particularly strong counterexample.

Hey, he said "world's most androgynous." I don't see how Farsi is less strong of an example?

As for Afroblanco's question about the evolution of other languages, well....
Paging languagehat!
posted by desuetude at 8:35 PM on March 17, 2006


I don't see how Farsi is less strong of an example?

Because you named one language and I named three.
posted by unSane at 8:38 PM on March 17, 2006


Afroblanco, what's your hypothesis on the questions you're asking?

I hope I'm wrong, but this seems like a bar conversation homework assignment. (after the fourth beer: "well, of course it's a proven fact that x language - very gendered, you know - is spoken by these totally gender-EGALITARIAN people. So of course the push to remove gendered language in English is clearly off-base.)
posted by mikel at 8:40 PM on March 17, 2006


Steven CDB makes some good points about Japanese, which I've studied. On the sentence level, it seems less gendered because you don't use articles. However, and maybe this is beyond the scope of your question, class issues play a huge (and from my gaijin perspective, maddening) role in terms of appropriate address. You speak differently to people depending on how they compare to your social status--but this can include stuff like age (older relatives are given much deference, children can be "spoke down" to without a problem). It's not rude or impolite to call a waitress "little sister," but that definitely wouldn't fly in most parts of America (I think this is common is Chinese as well--you're kind of speaking down to someone calling them little brother or little sister, but also acknowledging a pleasant familiarity). It goes beyond using appropriate pronouns--verbs and certain terms change as well.

That said, if you really want to see an attempt at extreme gender neutrality, there's gender queer, which is basically an after-the-fact attempt to neuter English, AFAICT. Interesting stuff.
posted by bardic at 8:49 PM on March 17, 2006


Response by poster: world's most androgynous

actually, I said one of the world's more androgynous

(I'm now going to step out for a minute. I feel like I'm doing too much moderating here)
posted by Afroblanco at 9:00 PM on March 17, 2006


There's a move towards gender-neutral pronouns among some American subcultures (& surely other nationalities), using they as a singular pronoun ("If Mary calls, say I'll call them right back."), or substituting ze & hir for gendered 3rd person pronouns ("I tried to call ze back, but I can't find hir phone number.").

In personal experience, English also tends to be a default language among sexual minorities. When I lived in Japan, I sometimes went to 'dyke weekends' organized by the woman who also ran the only lesbian bar in Tokyo. The dyke weekends were notable for being a fairly diverse, accepting, bilingual environment--one where middle aged women who wore wedding rings to work during the week to stave off the scorn of intrusive co-workers & indulge in being themselves. One night I was sitting next to a friend from Canada, and right next to us were two Japanese women talking about grocery shopping in English. Normally everyone was very conscientious about translating between languages, but in this case two native-born Japanese speakers were having a private conversation using English. I asked my Canadian friend what the hell, and she told me that when these women (& surely this applies to a lot of queer Japanese) were coming out, their language didn't have words to talk about their lives & experiences properly and so they had to use English. They'd become so accustomed to using English in a queer context that they defaulted to it without thinking, even to discuss something as banal as grocery shopping. Similarly, notice how English terms for queerness are adopted by many languages that have an otherwise rich descriptive vocabulary. This may also have something to do with their being lesbians rather than gay men: like in ancient Rome, 17th century Japan had similar sexual mentor/student relationships among men; the same idea was literally inconceivable among women, in whom sexual deviance wasn't thought to exist.

I'm not sure how gendered language correlates to a lack of sexism or strict gender roles in society (Finnish, for example, was the first country to allow women to serve in their parliament, & second to give suffrage to women; AFAIK it has no gendered pronouns. Hungarian, on the other hand, also has no gendered pronouns but distinguishes between worker and female-worker & I don't think is incredibly progressive..)

Slightly digressively, the gendered 3rd person pronoun is a fairly late arrival in English. According to wikipedia, In 1789, William H. Marshall records the existence of a dialectal English epicene pronoun, singular ou : "'Ou will' expresses either he will, she will, or it will." Marshall traces ou to Middle English epicene a, used by the fourteenth-century English writer John of Trevisa, and both the OED and Wright's English Dialect Dictionary confirm the use of a for he, she, it, they, and even I.

The dialectal epicene pronoun a is a reduced form of the Old and Middle English masculine and feminine pronouns he and heo. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the masculine and feminine pronouns had developed to a point where, according to the OED, they were "almost or wholly indistinguishable in pronunciation." The modern feminine pronoun she, which first appears in the mid twelfth century, seems to have been drafted at least partly to reduce the increasing ambiguity of the pronoun system....


On preview: goddamn, I talk a lot! & good timing with the Japanese, Steven C. Den Beste!
posted by soviet sleepover at 9:06 PM on March 17, 2006 [1 favorite]


I remember seeing an interview with a French author who recently toured America and wrote a book about American culture, sort of like a modern day Alexis de Tocqueville. And during the interview, he mentioned how Europeans culture is much less focused with politically correct language, e.g. de-gendering. But that's just one author's opinion, and he didn't appear to be an expert on language or anything.

You speak differently to people depending on how they compare to your social status

Tangent: I always liked this about Japanese, largely because I think the same thing is true in English, only we don't have formal rules to guide us. But if you're middle class and start talking to someone who is incredibly wealthy or incredibly poor, the difference becomes clear very quickly.
posted by scottreynen at 9:06 PM on March 17, 2006




I asked my Canadian friend what the hell, and she told me that when these women (& surely this applies to a lot of queer Japanese) were coming out, their language didn't have words to talk about their lives & experiences properly and so they had to use English.

Hmm... I spent a semester in university interning at a Japanese gay rights organization in Tokyo, and then I wrote my senior thesis on the history of lesbian suicide in Japan. I'd say your Canadian friend was wrong. Japanese baseball fans don't start speaking English at the grocery just because there are no native Japanese words to describe baseball. And there is more native Japanese language to describe homosexuality than baseball.
posted by scottreynen at 9:18 PM on March 17, 2006


assumed to be female as are cats

Um, no. Not unless you're male or a dog person. I've never met a cat person or a woman who believes this. In fact, I've been called an idiot many times for stating it.
posted by dobbs at 9:25 PM on March 17, 2006


ze & hir

These are just as erroneous as any other prescription, like not splitting infinitives. You can't invent new pronouns; it's a closed category.
posted by oaf at 10:59 PM on March 17, 2006


When I studied French in college years ago, they (that is, the French) were in fact talking about how constructions like "Madame le president" were idiotic, and whether they should be changed. But I got the impression that in French, unlike English, you basically immediately run up against so many gendered words that it's not all that practical to PC the language.

(And saying that romance languages don't need gender-specific subjects is silly. French, as has been pointed out, does need an explicit subject, and even in Italian, where it can be dropped, it's only dropped because the verb ending makes it implicit. You can do the same thing in English, and it's very often done in emails or journal entries: "Went to the hospital today. Visited my friend." But dropping the "I" has nothing to do with non-gendered language.)
posted by occhiblu at 11:21 PM on March 17, 2006


And actually, thinking about how some of this works in other languages vs. how it works in English leads me, at least, into some weird hypocrisies. In English, I'm fairly adamant about using one word for both sexes who perform the same job (eg, "actor" as gender-neutral) but I hear "Madame le president" and balk -- even thought it's basically the same idea to construct that thought. It's odd to think of the American PC ideal as letting women take the male titles and the romance language PC ideal as differentiating the titles by gender.

So to some extent, I think the wildly varying effects the change would have is what tends to lessen the call for change in non-English languages.
posted by occhiblu at 11:31 PM on March 17, 2006


Teece, English does have gender beyond the biological. Ships (and sometimes other modes of transport) are assumed to be female as are cats, unless proved otherwise.

Right, that why I said English gender usually refers to sex. Ships and (formerly) hurricanes were the reason I said generally. The reality is that those are trivial and idiosyncratic examples.

English gender is biological. In many other languages, gender is not at all biological.
posted by teece at 11:45 PM on March 17, 2006


Re: Japanese - It's not rude or impolite to call a waitress "little sister,"

I think you might be confusing oneesan (pronounced oneh-san, the word for older sister) that can also mean "young woman" with imouto (younger sister), because you wouldn't address a waitress as imouto (unless you happen to be in a deeply geeky area of Akihabara where the waitresses are dressed as maids and you happen to have a taste for that kind of thing. Which is a whole different story, and you still wouldn't call the waitress imouto, though she might call you oniichan). And when you address a young woman as "young woman," you're not being rude, because when you use it in that context it doesn't sound as rude as saying, "Hey, sister!" to a waitress in English.

It's true that often when I'm translating Japanese into English, I often have to ask about the sex of the people who appear in the text (if I can't guess from their names) because the entire article can be ambiguous about it from start to finish. So, to answer the original question, in Japanese I don't think there is any particular effort placed into making the language more neutral because it pretty much already is.

BUT, there are words that have always bugged the heck out of me, like okusan which literally means "person in the back" and kanai, which means "person in the house" for wife, and the polite way of referring to one's husband, shujin, which literally means "master." I mean, come on... So Japanese might be gender-neutral, but it's filled its share of sexist and, as others have pointed out above, class-oriented vocabulary, and as far as I know, not much effort is being placed into doing something about it.
posted by misozaki at 11:56 PM on March 17, 2006


(And saying that romance languages don't need gender-specific subjects is silly.

No its not. French is an exception but otherwise Romance languages are at least partially pro-drop languages. English isn't.
posted by vacapinta at 12:12 AM on March 18, 2006


To give an example when ungendered speech is more difficult: Hebrew verbs are conjugated according to sex, and more of the pronouns are distinguished by sex too - and there's no neuter gender. Imagine writing where you not only have to say "he or she" as a circumlocution, but you have double up other parts of speech as well. "Each(m) student(m) or each(f) student(f) may start(m) or start(f) his or her exam now." I'd say gender-neutral Hebrew is off to a bad start.

New Zealand Maori, our indigenous Polynesian language, does not distinguish sex or gender, but traditonal Maori culture has clearly defined, rigid sex roles.

I notice you refer to American English. Certainly in the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, gender-neutral language is gaining ground especially in official contexts. (Eg locally there was a minor stir when Radio New Zealand started to use the neologism "fishers" instead of "fishermen". We've long since got used to firefighters, chairs and "they" for "he or she".) Perhaps in other parts of the Commonwealth sexist usage still prevails but American English is not unique by any means.

I wish languagehat would show up, but he's probably tired of covering the same old ground again and again. Let me just try and say what he would explain much better and more accurately about grammatical gender. Masculine, feminine and neuter grammatical gender is really a sort of historical accident, where patterns of inflection and changes in pronunciation have resulted in a coincidence of classes of inflection ("genders") with semantic categories (the sexes). It is quite possible to have no genders (like Maori), two (like French or Hebrew), three (like German, Russian, Latin and Greek), and for all I know there are languages with four or more categories. It isn't necessarily so that languages with two categories map them onto sex either; they might just as well map onto animate vs inanimate or human vs non-human or whatever. It's far too complicated and obscure a business to allow you to infer much about what people are thinking...
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:23 AM on March 18, 2006 [1 favorite]


"You can't invent new pronouns; it's a closed category."

Maybe, maybe not. Young folks in Malaysia and Indonesian are now using the English "you" in preference to the welter of nuanced 2nd person pronouns and forms of address. And where I live "she" is gaining ground as an impersonal pronoun (eg "she's a bit cold outside"). I will die before "zir" ever crosses my lips but I don't doubt that pronouns can be introduced.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:34 AM on March 18, 2006


This article canvasses many of the issues discussed above. Non-English languages are discussed in some detail towards the end.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:37 AM on March 18, 2006


To my ears, calling a waitress "oneesan" does sound a bit rude--the only people I would hear doing it were men who were older than the waitress, and to me it sounded kind of like calling someone "honey" in English.
Not insulting, but not respectful.
posted by exceptinsects at 1:37 AM on March 18, 2006


i_am_joe's_spleen: I'm a young Malaysian, and I'm confused. What do you mean by your example? The only usage of "you" that I can think of is the Manglish spoken here occasionally.

Malay is a gender-neutral language - everyone's "dia". Some use "ia" for imanimate objects but that's apparently gramatically inaccurate. The only way you can tell the gender of the person in question is if it's described somewhere ("Perempuan itu", "lelaki ini") or if you can infer it by the name.

(I once got so confused by this when I was about 10 - I was reading an article about a contest winner and neither the name nor the person's photo could really nail it for me if it was a she or a he.)

Bengali is the same: everyone's "shey".
posted by divabat at 3:14 AM on March 18, 2006


Frankly, I find this a pretty uninteresting topic, because it's not at all clear what if any relation there is between linguistic gender and relations between the sexes and because there are so many aspects of linguistic gender (pronouns, verbal endings, noun classes, etc.) that you can pretty much prove whatever you want to by focusing on the right things. That having been said, the various varieties of Chinese, which together are far and away the most widely spoken language(s) on earth, have basically no gender whatever, so that's something to bear in mind. (See my comment here for examples of languages without he/she distinctions.)

English does have gender beyond the biological. Ships (and sometimes other modes of transport) are assumed to be female as are cats, unless proved otherwise.

That's just silly. You could go your entire life as an English-speaker without referring to ships (or any other inanimate objects) as "she," which is a pretty antiquated tradition anyway, and I've never heard of cats being "assumed to be female."
posted by languagehat at 6:06 AM on March 18, 2006


Afroblanco: What, exactly, is an "androgynous language?" The term means nothing to a linguist, but may bear connotations to a poet or someone working in gender studies - itself a very culturally defined outlook.

The gender situation in the English language is the inheritance of English' convoluted path that started from being a tidy little Germanic dialect to becoming creolized with Norman French in an astonishingly very short time. Bits of Old English declensions became fossilized as irregular verbs, class differences became embedded in vocabulary (cow/beef) and generally, English became a very beautiful, very messy language that is maddening to learn as a second language.

It should be obvious that gender indicators in language do not reveal whether a society which uses that language is going to be - by modern, 'western" standards - significantly more discriminatory in issues of gender.

In Romanian, for example, the gender of nouns follows the latin pattern, but for some reason almost everything that would be "feminine" in a western Romance language is masculine in Romanian.

In Hungarian there is no differentation between "he" "she" or "it", and we can often avoid the pronoun completely by embedding the idea in a verb ending. But whereas in English any man or woman leading a class of students is called "Teacher" in Hungarian we would almost always indicate that our class today was taught by either a "teacher" or a "teacher-woman."

If you really want a system that will mess with your concept of verb endings and pronoun gender, try an Iroquoian language... endless combinations that make English look like a sunday picnic!
posted by zaelic at 6:28 AM on March 18, 2006


Maybe, maybe not. Young folks in Malaysia and Indonesian are now using the English "you" in preference to the welter of nuanced 2nd person pronouns and forms of address.

And Indonesian media and advertising seem more likely to use 'anda' as a relatively status-neutral word for 'you'.

Historically, standard Indonesian (which is based on Malay) has been tinkered with to emphasize notions of national and social unity. Javanese, by contrast, has at least three different sets of vocabulary (krama, madya, ngoko) based on what your social status is versus the other person's. Not just pronouns--many common nouns and verbs for everyday things are completely different (Wikipedia, scroll down to 'politeness').

So, populist and nationalist leaders tried to stress language usage that moved away from emphasizing social status towards usage that emphasized national unity. (Of course, that also meant moving away from usage that sounded Javanese, for example, towards something that would be accepted in all regions.)

More recently, people who work in broadcast media, advertising copywriters, news presenters, can't really know the status of the person on the other end of the communication, so they're forced into status-neutral usage.

That's not specifically about gender, but it's sort of a similar movement to generalize language usage to deemphasize differences between people.
posted by gimonca at 7:58 AM on March 18, 2006


"In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl." -- Mark Twain, The Awful German Language
posted by kirkaracha at 8:47 AM on March 18, 2006


vacapinta, your link explains that the romance languages that drop pronouns do so because they can be inferred from the verb endings (which exactly explains why French doesn't do it, since you often can't hear the different endings on the verbs). So yes, they drop the pronoun, but not to promote ambiguity or because gender is unknown; they drop the prounoun precisely because it's totally obvious from context and therefore doesn't need to be stated.

And in Italian, at least (I have no experience with Spanish) if there is any ambiguity, then the name or gendered pronoun would be used.
posted by occhiblu at 9:34 AM on March 18, 2006


In other words, the pronouns are dropped because you can tell what they are, not to keep you from knowing what they are.
posted by occhiblu at 10:12 AM on March 18, 2006


In Spanish, there are many situations where gender defaults to male. For example, "En Lima, se encuentran muchos Peruanos." ("In Lima, there are many Peruvians." "Peruanos" encompasses all Peruvians, regardless of gender, although technically you're saying "male Peruvians.")

I've seen -- occasionally, in print only -- the use of the "@" symbol as a kind of "o/a," making nouns both masculine and feminine. The example above would be written "En Lima, se encuentran much@s Peruan@s."

It's sort of ingenious, and I appreciate the spirit in which it's intended. But i think it's clunky as all hell and hope it goes the way of the dinosaurs, Tiny Tim, and Esperanto. I also should note that this has seen very little actual usage.
posted by donpedro at 10:27 AM on March 18, 2006


In over 15 years, I've never heard anyone in France or Spain attach any importance to sexism in language. Then again, they have plenty of examples of more overt sexism to attack.

I have known several French and Spanish feminists who denounce American feminists for focusing too much on irrelevant symbolic issues and trying to equate feminism with the creation of a repressive climate for personal and sexual expression.
posted by fuzz at 11:09 AM on March 18, 2006 [1 favorite]


divabat: is this guy describing Manglish?
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:36 PM on March 18, 2006


Damnit.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:22 PM on March 18, 2006


i_am_joe's_spleen: The "I" and "you" thing is Manglish, yes - it still means what it means in English. It's not a replacement for "he/she".

What the article was trying to get at was that the Malay words for "I" and "You" differ by status:

saya - I, general, safest word to use really
aku - I, only used with God, or in some creative writing, or with someone you're really close with (it's considered rude otherwise)
patik - I, when a peasant refers to itself to royalty
beta - I, when a royal subject refers to itself

anda - You, more polite & general (a bit on the formal side)
awak - You, more informal (and can be considered crass)
engkau - You, even more informal, often used as a bit of a sneer/"you idiot" kinda tone
kamu - You, rarely used but a lot more politer than "awak" or "engkau" (the article says it's meant to be plural, which makes sense)

Using "I" and "You" in otherwise Malay speech is mostly an urban/suburban thing, where the languages tend to mash up. (There's also "lu" and "gua", which is a Chinese dialectal slang)

Some people use other words, like "abang/kakak/adik" (elder brother/elder sister/younger sibling) or the person's name, instead of "I"/"You" to be even more polite. If you're referring to someone of higher status than you (especially people with honorifics like Dato, Datin, etc) then you usually refer to them as their honorofic, rather than "anda/kamu/etc".

It really depends on who you're speaking to, really. The rules can look confusing but it's quite subtle.
posted by divabat at 8:52 PM on March 18, 2006


i_am_joe's_spleen: The "I" and "you" thing is Manglish, yes - it still means what it means in English. It's not a replacement for "he/she".

What the article was trying to get at was that the Malay words for "I" and "You" differ by status:

saya - I, general, safest word to use really
aku - I, only used with God, or in some creative writing, or with someone you're really close with (it's considered rude otherwise)
patik - I, when a peasant refers to itself to royalty
beta - I, when a royal subject refers to itself

anda - You, more polite & general (a bit on the formal side)
awak - You, more informal (and can be considered crass)
engkau - You, even more informal, often used as a bit of a sneer/"you idiot" kinda tone
kamu - You, rarely used but a lot more politer than "awak" or "engkau" (the article says it's meant to be plural, which makes sense)

Using "I" and "You" in otherwise Malay speech is mostly an urban/suburban thing, where the languages tend to mash up. (There's also "lu" and "gua", which is a Chinese dialectal slang)

Some people use other words, like "abang/kakak/adik" (elder brother/elder sister/younger sibling) or the person's name, instead of "I"/"You" to be even more polite. If you're referring to someone of higher status than you (especially people with honorifics like Dato, Datin, etc) then you usually refer to them as their honorofic, rather than "anda/kamu/etc".

It really depends on who you're speaking to, really. The rules can look confusing but it's quite subtle.

on preview: Ah, I see why I got so confused. I thought you were talking about us using "I"/"You" as a replacement for "he/she" and I always figured 1st or 2nd person pronouns were always gender-neutral anyway, when this discussion was more about 3rd person pronouns.
posted by divabat at 9:01 PM on March 18, 2006


argh, sorry! ignore the first comment and read the one below it. damn connection - it didn't show up on preview...
posted by divabat at 9:01 PM on March 18, 2006


Cool, I'm glad to be corrected by a native speaker. You're right, I was trying to address the contention that pronouns are a "closed category. But in fact there are languages where first or second person pronouns are also gender specific. Eg in Hebrew there are masculine and feminine forms for "you". And according to this article Thai offers a range of choice in first person pronouns according to the speaker's sex.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:56 PM on March 18, 2006


Response by poster: Thank you guys for your answers. Here is the situation, as I understand it now :

English may not be one of the more androgynous languages. This is unclear. However, it wasn't an important part of my question.

There are efforts to eliminate gender-specificity in other languages. However, it is hard to make direct comparisons because different languages use gender in different ways.

There only seems to be anecdotal evidence that lack of gender-specificity in a language leads to equality between the sexes. It may not even be possible to prove this, since gender-use in languages is such a broad topic.

This has been an interesting discussion. I'm glad I asked this question.
posted by Afroblanco at 1:47 AM on March 19, 2006


I've seen the Spanish @ a bit, mostly from bilingual American leftists, i.e. compañer@s. I don't think it's spoken, though. (Go fig.)

Tangentially, an Esperanto reform, riismo, wants to use a general epicene pronoun ri in place of li (he) and shi (she), and a distinct masculine suffix -ich- to pair with the feminine suffix -in-, so, viro person, viricho man, virino woman. Presently, we just have viro man and virino woman.
posted by graymouser at 11:17 AM on March 21, 2006


Just saw this link, thought I'd throw it in here, even if the thread's a bit old:

Vive la France! But not "la Mademoiselle!"

A French feminist group called les Chiennes de Garde (literally, "the female guard dogs") has published a petition lobbying the French government to do away with the distinction between "Madame" and "Mademoiselle," the two appellations used to address French women. The former, of course, is akin to "Mrs." and indicates that a woman is married. The latter is "Miss" and means she's single.

According to Les Chiennes de Garde, it's unjust that women are forced to identify themselves according to their marital status, while men are identified only by gender. In the petition, they write that the distinction means that "a woman has to give an indication about her availability, in particular her sexual availability. A letter box is not meant to be a dating agency."

posted by occhiblu at 12:20 PM on April 25, 2006 [1 favorite]


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