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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.
Swiss French (French: français de Suisse or suisse romand) is the variety of French spoken in the French-speaking area of Switzerland known as Romandy. French is one of the four official languages of Switzerland, the others being German, Italian, and Romansch. In 2020 around 2 million people, or 22.8% of the population, in Switzerland spoke ...
Languages with grammatical gender, such as French, German, Greek, and Spanish, present unique challenges when it comes to creating gender-neutral language.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.
The French language raises similar concerns to that of the German language. This is because many nouns (especially those of professions) are gendered. To address these concerns, the Swiss government has created a guide on the non-sexist use of the French language. However, these attempts at change have been met with little success.
The four national languages of Switzerland are German, French, Italian, and Romansh. [3] German, French, and Italian maintain equal status as official languages at the national level within the federal administration of the Swiss Confederation, while Romansh is used in dealings with people who speak it. [4]
a close relationship or connection; an affair. The French meaning is broader; liaison also means "bond"' such as in une liaison chimique (a chemical bond) lingerie a type of female underwear. littérateur an intellectual (can be pejorative in French, meaning someone who writes a lot but does not have a particular skill). [35] louche
Other nouns change meaning depending on which grammatical gender they are used in. For example, le critique (masculine) refers to a critic, while la critique (feminine) means criticism; le livre refers to a book, while la livre means the pound (in the sense of both weight and currency).
Furthermore, some see evidence of the intentional preference of the masculine over the feminine. It has been argued that 17th-century grammaticians who wanted to assert male dominance worked to suppress the feminine forms of certain professions, leading to the modern-day rule that prefers the masculine over the feminine in the French language. [4]