Gender neutrality in genderless languages is typically achieved by using gender-inclusive words ("human being", "person", "businessperson", and so on) instead of gender-specific ones ("man", "he", "businessman", etc.) when one speaks of people whose gender is unknown, ambiguous, or unimportant. When only a gender-specific word happens to be available, a gender-inclusive neologism may be coined to replace it.
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Estonian word ta (or tema) is gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". The suffix -tar or -nna can be added to the end of some words (mostly professions) to make them feminine, although these nouns are in their basic form gender-neutral: laulja (singer), lauljatar (female singer) or lauljanna (female singer); näitleja (actor) - näitlejanna (actress) or näitlejatar (actress). This is rather common. Also, for instance, there are separate words for chairman: esimees (chairman) and esinaine (chairwoman), although the first form is used a lot more often. Most of the professions are gender-neutral: politseinik (policeman or woman), arst (doctor), müüja (salesman or woman), õpetaja (teacher), sõdur (soldier), ehitaja (builder), even lüpsja (milkmaid, male or female). A well-known exception is med. õde (nurse, literally "med[ical] sister").
Some words are clearly masculine or feminine. For example, in Estonian there is no "Motherland", there is only a "Fatherland" (isamaa) and a "Homeland" (kodumaa). There is also only a "mother" (native) tongue (emakeel). A very popular Estonian saying is "Kes ees, see mees" — "The first one is the man".
Finnish has only gender-neutral pronouns and completely lacks grammatical gender. The word hän is gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". The suffix -tar or -tär can be added to some words (mostly professions) to make them feminine if required, for example näyttelijä (actor), näyttelijätär (actress), but these forms are not commonly used any more; using the basic word for both genders (näyttelijä for male and female actors) is the norm. There are also some professions or expressions of which the word mies (man) is an integral part, for example, puhemies, meaning chairman; palomies, fireman, etc. These are mostly retained in their traditional forms, unless a suitable gender-free word is easily available. As a special case the chairperson of the Finnish Parliament is referred as puhemies irrespective of the actual gender — either herra puhemies (Mr. Chairman) or rouva puhemies (Mrs. or Madame Chairman).
Despite having gender-neutral pronouns, Finnish is similar to most other Western languages in favoring gender-biased adjectives due to social values. As an example, in the first few years after women were permitted to serve as volunteers in the Finnish armed forces, they were required to swear to defend the country in a manly way (miehuullisesti).
Hungarian does not have gender-specific pronouns and lacks grammatical gender: referring to a gender needs explicit statement of "the man" (he) or "the woman" (she). The 3rd. person singular pronoun ő means "he/she" and ők means "they". Hungarian does distinguish persons from things, as the latter are referred to as az (it) or azok (those).
However there is a way to distinguish between male and female persons having a certain profession by adding -nő "woman" to the end of the word: színész-színésznő (actor-actress, lit. "actorwoman") or rendőr-rendőrnő (lit. policeman-policewoman). This though does not work with all the professions as quite many would sound very awkward, like postás meaning "letter carrier", lit. "someone associated with the post", so that there is no such thing as postásnő (mailwoman). This usage has been criticized by Hungarian feminists, as it implies that the normal word or profession is masculine in nature and must only be qualified if a woman is performing it.
Among all Iranians languages only Kurdish and Zazaki have got feminin/masculin/neutral genders. All other Iranians languages like Persion, Afganian, Darian... are genderless. Persian is a genderless language. For both males and females, the same nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are used. For example,
In Persian, the same nouns are used for male and female professionals. For example: baazigar (بازیگر) means both actor and actress. Pish khedmat (پیشخدمت) might mean waiter or waitress. The noun suffix -ash (اَش) serves either as a possessive adjective or an object pronoun for both males and females as well as things, situations, etc. For example,
Oo labash raa boosid (او لبش را بوسید) means "He kissed her lips" or "she kissed his lips" or "he kissed his lips" or "she kissed her lips" or if we consider -ash as an object pronoun we can translate the sentence as "he/she kissed her/him on the lips".
In Bengali, although there are different nouns for professions, but they are not commonly used, so the language has consequently become gender-neutral. In addition, objects, pronouns and almost all adjectives are gender-neutral.
The Basque language is largely gender-free. Most nouns have no gender, though there are different words for males and females in some cases (ama, "mother"; aita, "father"; aita-ama, "father and mother"; guraso, "parent"). Some words take suffixes according to gender (aktore, "actor"; aktoresa, "actress"), but they are rare, and both purists who avoid Romance influences and the Basque Institute of the Woman recommend against it. For animals, there are particles (oilo, "hen"; oilar, "cock"; hartz eme, "female bear"; hartz arra, "male bear") or different words (behi, "cow"; zezen, "bull").
While there are no gender-specific pronouns, Basque verbs can agree allocutively with the gender in the intimate singular second person (this provides no information since the listener already knows his or her gender): hik duk, "you (male) have it"; hik dun, "you (female) have it". The verb is marked for addressee's gender, if they are intimate singular, whether or not they are referred to in the clause. Non-sexism supporters propose substituting those forms by the more formal ones: zuk duzu "you have it". In earlier stages, the relation between hik and zuk was like that of you and thou in early modern English. Some Basque dialects already avoid hik as too disrespectful.
The Chinese language or languages/topolects are largely gender-neutral, and possess few linguistic gender marker, even though the Chinese society has historically been shown to have significant degree of male dominance in the social structure as well as education and literature.
Comprehension of written and spoken Chinese is almost wholly dependent on word order, as it has no inflections for gender, tense, or case. There are also very few derivational inflection; instead, the language relies heavily on compounding to create new words. A Chinese word is thus inherently gender-neutral, but any given word can be preceded by an adjective/root indicating masculinity or femininity. For example, the word for "doctor" is yīshēng (醫生) and can only be made gender-specific by adding the root for "male" or "female" to the front of it; thus to specify a male doctor, one would need to prefix nán 男 (male), as in nányīshēng (男醫生). Under normal circumstances both male and female doctors would simply be referred to as yīshēng (醫生).
Spoken Mandarin Chinese also has only one third-person pronoun, tā for all referents (though -men 們 / 们 can be added as a plural suffix). Tā can mean "he", "she", or "it". However, the different meanings of tā are written with different characters: "他", containing the human radical "亻", from "人", meaning person, for he or a person of undetermined gender; "她", containing the feminine radical "女", for "she"; and "它/牠" for "it".
The character for "she", containing the "woman" radical (glyphic element of a character's composition), was invented in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century due to western influence; prior to this, the character indicating "he" today was used for both genders — it contains the "person" radical, which, as noted above, is not gender-specific (likewise there exists a written feminine form for "you", 妳, which is almost never used).
In written Cantonese, the third-person singular pronoun is keui5, written as 佢; it may be used to refer to people of either gender. The practice of replacing the "亻" radical with "女" (forming the character 姖) to specifically indicate the female gender may also be seen occasionally in informal writing; however, this is neither widely accepted nor grammatically or semantically required, and the character 姖 has a separate meaning in standard Chinese.[1]
Japanese has no grammatical gender or number. Thus, isha (医者) can mean one or many male doctors, one or many female doctors, or many male and female doctors. Another example of the lack of European-style gender in this language is the using of compound characters. The sha in geisha (芸者?, art person) and the ja in ninja (忍者?, sneaking person) are the same character. Pronouns are generally avoided unless the meaning is unclear.
The plural of kare, karera (彼ら), may also refer to groups of females, and is preferable to the rather demeaning kanojo-tachi (彼女達?, those women). Gender neutral language modification advocates suggest avoiding karera by instead using "those people" (あの人達 ano hito-tachi), which they praise as gender neutral, grammatical and natural-sounding. However, until the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century, kare (彼?) was used for both genders; kanojo (彼女?) meant "girlfriend", as it still does.
In general, Japanese, unlike most European languages, has no grammatical gender, although certain words and expressions semantically refer specifically to males or specifically to females (such as haha "mother", bijin "beautiful woman"). However, the language spoken by Japanese women is markedly different from the speech of Japanese men in terms of vocabulary, use of grammar and idioms, pronunciation, etc.
An increasing number of Japanese avoid the traditional common terms for "[your] wife" (奥さん okusan) and "[your] husband" (ご主人 goshujin), which literally mean "the person inside" and "the master". Japanese custom has also dictated that women be expected to use a polite form of language (keigo) in more situations than men. This expectation has diminished more among urban young female Japanese in the past decade.
The major issues with regarded to gendered language in Japanese are overall speech patterns. There exists a "woman's language" (onna kotoba) . Women's speech has different sentence endings than that of men, especially in non-polite speech. (Polite speech tends to be less differentiated, with male speech becoming more similar to female). A good example is the gender-neutral use of watashi or watakushi for "I" in polite speech. In informal speech, women are still more likely to use watashi or atashi, while men use boku, ore or washi. Women's speech is characterized by sentences ending with wa (rising intonation) and by dropping the verbs da or desu (meaning "is"). Male speech never drops the word da in a sentence. The differences are quite intricate, but very persistent, and there is little or no movement in Japan to change male/female speech patterns, since changes can sound awkward or confusing. However, some historians note that over time Japanese usage as a whole is shifting toward the feminine forms. Before recent times, men never used words like kane ("money") with the honorific prefix o-. Today okane is standard Japanese and is used by men in non-polite situations, something unthinkable a hundred years ago.
Korean, like a few other East Asian languages such as Japanese, does not use pronouns in everyday language, relying on context to clarify the intended meaning. In case of confusion, there are pronouns to clarify the position, but normally the actual subject (person) is named rather than the pronoun. As for job titles, these are not gender-specific. Again, the meaning is normally clear in the context.
As an Austronesian language, Malay is fundamentally gender-neutral. The third-person singular pronoun dia can 'he', 'she' or sometimes 'it', and the object/possessive suffix -nya can mean 'him/his', 'her' or 'it/its'. For example, dia mencintainya means 'he/she loves him/her/it'.
Most nouns that refer to people are also gender-neutral, and need to be qualified when gender is to be expressed. For example, budak means 'child', and is used far more frequently than the gender-specific phrases budak perempuan, 'female child' and so 'girl', and budak lelaki, 'male child' and so 'boy'. Likewise, the words doktor ('doctor'), pelayan ('waiter') and most other nouns that are attributable to people are gender-neutral, and need to be modified by the adjectives perempuan or lelaki to become engendered (for animals, the adjectives betina and jantan are used instead; a harimau betina is a 'tigress'). However, Malay vocabulary has many nouns borrowed from Arabic and Sanskrit that do indicate gender. For example, an Islamic religious teacher is either an ustaz (male) or an ustazah (female), and a noble person is either a puteri ('princess') or a putera ('prince'), as used in the legal ethnic classification Bumiputera.
Quechuan languages, spoken in the central Andes, are agglutinative using only suffixes, but have no gender suffix.
With the exception of mama and tata, and wallpa and k'anka (hen and rooster), no nouns are gender-specific. In Southern Quechuan, qhari (man) and warmi (woman) are very seldom used along with a noun referring to a person, as in warmi wawa and qhari wawa for daughter and son. For animals urqu and china serve the same purpose, as in urqu khuchi and china khuchi for pig and sow.
No pronouns distinguish gender, the third singular pay being he/she/it.
Tagalog, like other Austronesian languages, is gender-neutral; pronouns do not even have specific genders.
However, because Tagalog has had over three centuries of Spanish influence, gender is usually differentiated in certain Spanish loanwords by way of the suffixes -o (masculine) and -a (feminine). These words mostly refer to ethnicities, occupations, and family. Some examples are: Pilipino/Pilipina (Filipino/a), Pinoy/Pinay (nickname for a Filipino person), tindero/tindera (vendor), inhinyero/inhinyera (engineer), tito/tita (uncle/aunt), manong/manang (elder brother/sister), and lolo/lola (grandfather/grandmother).
Dravidian languages have a gender-neutral form for the third-person plural, which is also used for the third-person singular in all formal communication. Most job titles are derived from this form as they are mostly used in a formal context. They are thus gender-free. It is commonly used to address also, people of higher status, age or stature.
Turkish is a gender neutral language, like most other Turkic languages. Nouns have a generic form and this generic form is used for both males and females. For example, doktor (doctor), eczacı (pharmacist), mühendis (engineer) etc. Very few words for person reference contain a clue to the gender of the referred person, such as anne/baba "mother/father", kız/oğlan "girl/boy", hanım/bey "lady/sir"[2]
The Turkish equivalent to "he", "she", and "it" is o. For example:
There are a few exceptions, where it is mandatory to provide gender (because of a word's foreign origin):
Very minor exceptions were constructed from native Turkish words after the 1900s:
However, there is an alternative gender neutral use for words like these, which has become more popular in the 2000s:
At the same time research have shown a significant presence of semantically-implied genderness (covert gender) in Turkish. In addition to the absence of semantic gender neutrality it was also noted that the usage of gender markings in Turkish is asymmetrical. In translations of sentences from English texts where the gender is evident (e.g., usage of he/she or male vs. female context, such as police job vs. pregnancy, etc.) it was noticed that feminine gender was marked in 50% of cases, while masculine was marked only in 5% of cases. While translations is not a typical representative of linguistic data, similar asymmetry was also observed in Turkish literary and newspaper texts.[2][3]
In Ido, only two couples of nouns are gender-specific: viro-muliero (man-woman) and patro-matro (father-mother). Other nouns referring to people, and all nouns referring to animals can equally be used to refer to a male or female: doktoro (a doctor), frato (a brother or a sister, i.e.: a sibling), hundo (a dog). And even the two pairs of words above have related nouns that are ambiguous about gender: homo (a human being), adulto (an adult person), genitoro (a parent).
When it is necessary to specify the gender, the suffixes -in for females, and -ul for males is inserted right before the final -o of any noun referring to either human beings or animals. Thus, from frato (sibling) the words fratino (a sister) and fratulo (a brother) can be obtained. However these forms are to be used only if the gender is relevant for the context, as in the following examples:
As for pronouns, they are not gender-specific in the first or second persons, singular and plural. In the third person singular, there are four pronouns (the U between brackets can be used or left out, mostly according to personal choice): il(u) (he), el(u) (she), ol(u) (it, when it refers back to an actual inanimate noun, and not in sentences as "It's raining"), and additionally lu, which can be used instead of any of the other three pronouns, whether it be for stylistic purposes, personal choice, or to refer to an indefinite being (usually human or animal) that can be thought of indifferently as male or female. For example:
Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos doktoro e lu decidez quon me agos (My head aches. I'll call a doctor, so he/she decides what I'll do)
Since I don't know whether a male or female doctor will come, I cannot use here il(u) or el(u). And I definitely cannot use ol(u) since I know for a fact that the doctor who comes is going to be a human being.
Now if instead of "a" doctor, I decided to call "my" doctor (therefore, knowing whether it will be a man or a woman), I could use any of the following:
1.- Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos mea doktoro ed il decidez quon me agos (My head aches. I'll call my doctor, so he decides what I'll do)
2.- Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos mea doktoro ed el decidez quon me agos (My head aches. I'll call my doctor, so she decides what I'll do)
3.- Mea kapo doloras. Me advokos mea doktoro e lu decidez quon me agos (My head aches. I'll call my doctor, so he/she decides what I'll do)
In sentence number 1, the doctor is a man, so the masculine pronoun is used. In sentence number 2, the doctor is a woman, so the noun is referred back with a feminine pronoun. But in sentence number 3, even though I know if the doctor is a man or a woman, it is perfectly possible to still dodge the definition by using the always available gender-neutral pronoun lu. Notice however that doktoro is never marked for gender in these sentences, since the doctor will be called in his/her professional capacity, and not for being a man or a woman. Actually, saying Me advokos mea doktorino (or mea doktorulo) implies I have a choice between a male and a female doctor, and I have decided on either of them.
In the third person plural, all of these pronouns have a correlative: ili, eli, and oli (only if a group of men, women or inanimate things or concepts respectively is referred). And li if no gender-specificity is required or even possible (for example, if the pronoun refers to a group including both men and women). In practice, the first three pronouns are usually avoided unless a point wants to be made as to the gender of the people referred, or in complex sentences, where gender information is given to clarify the meaning. For example:
La matri e sua filii recevis la premio quan eli decidis. ("The mothers and their children received the prize they -i.e.: the mothers, not the children- decided", provided that the children are not all girls).
Me pruntis ta libri de mea amiki, e nun me ne povas trovar oli ("I borrowed those books from my friends, and now I can't find them -i.e.: the books, not the friends who are not inanimate beings that can be referred back with oli").
Lingua Franca Nova completely lacks grammatical gender. The word el means "she", "he", and "it". If gender is significant, one may use words such as la fem, la om, la xica, la xico, etc. (the woman, the man, the girl, the boy). In place of "it", one can use words such as la cosa, la idea, esta, acel, etc. (the thing, the idea, this, that).
Terms for various professions are gender neutral, as are terms for animals. If need be, mas o fema can be used as adjectives for "male" and "female", respectively. Certain traditional roles have -esa for the female, such as prinsesa, contesa, etc. Most family terms distinguish male and female by varying the final vowel, such as tia/tio, fia/fio, ava/avo etc. (aunt/uncle, daughter/son, grandmother/grandfather). Only madre/padre and sore/frate (mother/father, sister/brother) use distinct terms.