Gender neutrality in English  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Gender-neutral language is language that minimizes assumptions about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing. In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, English does not retain grammatical gender and most of its nouns, adjectives and pronouns are therefore not gender-specific. In most other Indo-European languages, nouns are grammatically masculine (as in Spanish el humano) or grammatically feminine (as in French la personne), or sometimes grammatically neuter (as in German das Mädchen), regardless of the actual gender of the referent.

In addressing natural gender, English speakers use linguistic strategies that may reflect the speaker's attitude to the issue or the perceived social acceptability of such strategies.

See also

• Epicene
• Gender in English
• Gender role
• Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender
• Gender neutrality in genderless languages
• Gender marking in job titles
• Generic antecedent
• Markedness
• Unisex name