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For example, William Safire in his "On Language" column in The New York Times approved of the use of generic he, mentioning the mnemonic phrase "the male embraces the female". [47] A reader replied with an example of use of the purportedly gender-neutral he, as in (20).
Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids reference towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, [1] formation of phrases in a coequal manner, and discontinuing the collective use of male or female terms. [2]
For example, advocates of gender-neutral language challenge the traditional use of masculine nouns and pronouns (e.g. "man" and "he") when referring to two or more genders or to a person of an unknown gender in most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages. This stance is often inspired by feminist ideas about gender equality. [1]
Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional ...
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.
Many Australian languages have a system of gender superclassing in which membership in one gender can mean membership in another. [15] Worrorra: Masculine, feminine, terrestrial, celestial, and collective. [16] Halegannada: Originally had 9 gender pronouns but only 3 exist in present-day Kannada. Zande: Masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate.
Another example of lack of parallelism would be the use, in the same article, of first names for women and last names for men, unless the people involved have a documented preference in this regard. The Manual of Style section on gender-neutral language states, "Use gender-neutral language where this can be done with clarity and precision ...
Through language contact, some words that are originally part of a genderless system develop a grammatical gender. There are two primary ways linguists currently classify and understand this process as occurring: the first is through language contact impacting a language independent of borrowings, and the second is explicitly in the context of loanwords or borrowings.