Languages Don’t Have to Be Gendered

When speaking the English language, native speakers of Mandarin and Korean—among other East Asian languages—often find themselves misusing the pronouns “he” and “she.” The reason? Third-person pronouns are often gender-neutral in their native tongues, unlike in most European languages.

The Chinese language, for example, uses the word ta to indicate feminine, masculine, and neuter pronouns. While the word is now written in three different characters, distinguished by their respective radicals, gender differences did not come into place in the written system until the early 20th century, when China’s young intellectuals sought to westernize the Chinese society during the New Culture Movement (xin wenhua yundong).

Part of the process was to revise the Chinese writing system, emulating the gender system in European languages. But the pronunciation remained the same. It is also worth noting that most other gendered nouns in European languages, such as “actor/actress” or “réalisateur/réalisatrice,” do not exist in Mandarin Chinese. For example, yanyuan refers to all performers regardless of their genders.

Read more: Victor Mair’s blog post on Language Log.