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Many words in modern English refer specifically to people or animals of a particular sex. [28] An example of an English word that has retained gender-specific spellings is the noun-form of blond/blonde, with the former being masculine and the latter being feminine. This distinction is retained primarily in British English. [29]
the. MASC. SG abuelo grandfather el abuelo the.MASC.SG grandfather "the grandfather" Feminine la the. FEM. SG abuela grandmother la abuela the.FEM.SG grandmother "the grandmother" Example of grammatical gender in Spanish "Grammatical" gender Number Phrase Masculine Singular el the. MASC. SG plato dish el plato the.MASC.SG dish "the dish" Plural los the. MASC. PL platos dishes los platos the ...
Gender-neutral language is language that avoids 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.
She graduated in Modern Languages from the Complutense University of Madrid (1978), and received her Ph.D. in 1991. [4]She is a professor of sociolinguistics in the area of English Philology, attached to the Department of Modern Philology at the University of Alcalá, of whose Faculty of Philosophy and Letters she was dean between 2003 and 2008.
Some languages without noun class may have noun classifiers instead. This is common in East Asian languages.. American Sign Language; Bengali (Indo-European); Burmese; Modern written Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) has gendered pronouns introduced in the 1920s to accommodate the translation of Western literature (see Chinese pronouns), which do not appear in spoken Chinese.
Unlike genderless languages like English, constructing a gender-neutral sentence can be difficult or impossible in these languages due to the use of gendered nouns and pronouns. For example, in Spanish, the masculine gender generally precedes the feminine, and the default form of address for a group of students is the masculine plural los ...
Professor of English Tara Williams has suggested that modern notions of femininity in English-speaking society began during the medieval period at the time of the bubonic plague in the 1300s. [9] Women in the Early Middle Ages were referred to simply within their traditional roles of maiden , wife , or widow .
Example of gender-neutral masculine: English (5) a. If anybody comes, tell him. masculine him used to refer to a person of unknown sex b. *If anybody comes, tell her. feminine her is not used to refer to a person of unknown sex Example of collective masculine: French (6) a. Vos amis sont arrivés — Ils étaient en avance.