The Need for Gender-Neutral Language

I have been tutoring my friend in French for the past few months. We sit together in our dorm after class, watch French movies, and practice our pronunciations. We’ve also started to realize how often you can get away with not knowing a French word by simply pronouncing the English equivalent with a French accent (télévision, créatif, cataclysme ... the system works). Everything was going well until my friend, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns in English, pointed out that because French is a grammatically gendered language where everything is assigned as male or female, the language does not recognize their existence.

Words matter. Sometimes they are used to condemn (think Voldemort, aka “He who shall not be named”) and can have the power to address and change past denigrations (such as the Washington Redskins football team finally being renamed the “Washington Football Team”).

It also matters when a language doesn’t have words that are needed to accurately describe someone or something. Gender-neutral individuals are facing that dilemma today across many different languages.

To promote language inclusivity, LGBTQIA+ activists have created new nonbinary pronouns (such as zie, xe in English) and have adapted grammatical structures and words in languages that do not have sufficient genderless spaces (such as assigning gender-neutral endings to verbs in Arabic and Hebrew).

Back in 2015, Sweden officially introduced a gender-neutral, singular pronoun, hen, into their dictionary as a complement to the existing pronouns hon (she) and han (he). Inspired by the Finnish pronoun hän (referring to any person, as Finnish is a genderless language), “hen” was first proposed in the 1960s, but did not start gaining significant traction until around 2012. That year, Sweden’s first gender-neutral children’s book — Kivi Och Monsterhund, which used hen pronouns rather than hon and han — was published. In 2011, hen was used once for every 13,000 hon or han usages. In 2012, after the book was published, the number rose to once every 416, and continued to rise; by 2018, hen was used once to every 133 hon and han.

Languages like German and French, however, are grammatically gendered, meaning all nouns have assigned binary genders (male or female), and adjectives subsequently change form to masculine or feminine depending on the subject word (such as la étudiante active and l’étudiant actif in French).

German is a gendered language; however, some German institutions are pushing for more neutrality. In 2014, the federal justice ministry mandated that all state bodies use gender-neutral formulations in their paperwork. For example, the German word for voter — wähler (male gendered) and wählerin (female gendered) — would become the gender-neutral form wählende. Alternatively, in certain schools and publications, words are more commonly asterisked to include both masculine and feminine versions to create gender neutrality — bürger*innen (citizen) adapted from bürger (male gendered) and bürgerinnen (female gendered). Xier and sier from sie (she) and er (he) are also becoming more commonly used as gender-neutral pronouns. In January 2019, Hanover became the first German city to mandate all official communications use gender-neutral terms.

These efforts have received some pushback, however. Responding to the Hanover mandate, the Association for German Language asserted that the gender-neutral modifications were a “destructive intrusion” on the German language. German linguists continue to discuss how to standardize gender-neutral words, but many groups still vehemently oppose these efforts.

French linguists have not yet created a gender-neutral way to change all words, but they have found ways to adapt gendered words and also have begun asterisking word forms to make them gender-neutral, similar to German, for example, the word friend: ami (male gendered) and amie (female gendered) can become ami*e (gender-neutral). The French people have also adopted a hybrid version of he and she (il and elle into iel) that Le Petit Robert, a common French dictionary, even recently added as a new entry.

In response to Le Petit Robert’s addition, France’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, tweeted that “inclusive writing is not the future of the French Language.” Blanquer had also announced a ban on schools using gender-inclusive writing a few months earlier. And Blanquer is not alone in his sentiment — in 2017, the French government warned against the use of such gender-neutral language in official documents, with the Académie Française calling the gender-neutral text an “aberration.”

“Changing language isn’t going to change the world on its own,” Deborah Cameron, a professor of language and communication at Worcester College, said in June, acknowledging the ban of gender-inclusive language in French schools, “but both actual linguistic changes and conversations about linguistic changes are part of the process through which norms and attitudes change.”

Check out the Women's Media Center's own online guide to bias-free words and phrases here.