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LGBT+ rights advocates and feminists have argued in favour of the pronoun's use, arguing that it makes the language more inclusive and less sexist. [15] [16] [17] Some advocates have also raised concerns that lack of gender neutral options in French might force non-binary people to turn towards languages that do have more prominent gender neutral options instead, notably the English language.
French personal pronouns (analogous to English I, you, he/she, we, and they) reflect the person and number of their referent, and in the case of the third person, its gender as well (much like the English distinction between him and her, except that French lacks an inanimate third person pronoun it or a gender neutral they and thus draws this distinction among all third person nouns, singular ...
French grammar is the set of rules by which the French language creates statements, questions and commands. In many respects, it is quite similar to that of the other Romance languages. French is a moderately inflected language.
This is a key difference from English: in English, possessive pronouns are inflected to indicate the gender and number of their antecedent — e.g., in "the tables are his", the form "his" indicates that the antecedent (the possessor) is masculine singular, whereas in the French les tables sont les siennes, "siennes" or its base form "sien ...
This leads to sentences such as (5a) in English, and (6a) in French. 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.
The same can happen in French with the epicene elided singular articles (l'), the definite (les) and indefinite (des) plural articles, and the contractions aux (à + les) and des (de + les) when in contact with the noun, so the adjective takes the task of marking the gender:
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 ]
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.