Can Language Be Gender-Neutral?

Of all the cultural controversies that have stirred up Western intellectuals, politicians, and practically everyone else over the past few decades, perhaps none is so hot as gender. All debates over society and culture involve language to some extent, but those over gender present challenges that are unusually fundamental.

In English, by far the biggest is over whether the pronoun “they” can apply to a single person. Anyone reading a linguistics blog in English will of course be familiar with the pronoun and the controversy surrounding it, but more surprising is how deep-rooted issues with gendered language are. Censorious writers have been criticising people for using it to refer to individuals since the 18th Century, long before anyone they were correcting was “woke.”

It will be heartening to those who favour the de-gendering of our language that shifts that occur naturally are far more enduring than those driven by political fiat. Cultural attitudes can drive cosmetic changes to phase out an individual term, for example the style “miss,” and its equivalents mademoiselle and Fräulein. But grammar, which is often gendered, is far harder.

Indeed, for most European languages, a genderless future is impossible. Romance languages assign one of two grammatical genders to everything; German has three (masculine, feminine, or neuter). Pervasive…