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Non-sexist language (gender-generic, gender-inclusive, gender-neutral, or sex-neutral language) is language that attempts to refer neither to males nor females when discussing an abstract or hypothetical person whose sex cannot otherwise be determined, as opposed to sexist language, which attempts to refer to males. The goal is to keep the language as inoffensive as possible, similar to the idea of political correctness.
One might state, "Tomorrow I will meet my new doctor; I hope he is friendly."; however, unless one is certain that the new doctor is a man, advocates of non-sexist language generally argue that it would be better to state, "Tomorrow I will meet Dr. Smith, who I hope is friendly." (Critics would point out that this example is rather contrived, since non-defining relative clauses are extremely rare in everyday speech. The person in this example would be talking like a book.)
A business might advertise that it is looking for a new chair or chairperson, rather than a new chairman, thereby implying that only a man would be acceptable for this position. Some advocates of non-sexist language would see it as unobjectionable to refer to a man in such a position as a chairman, provided that a woman would be referred to by the equivalent term chairwoman. Others would claim, however, that the sex of the occupant of the chair is irrelevant and thus chairperson is the only acceptable term.
Likewise, if a woman states that she is dating someone; a system of non-sexist language might deem it inappropriate to ask her, "Who is he?"; rather, one should ask, "Whom are you dating?" to allow for the possibility that she might be dating a woman. Such language is an attempt to avoid heterosexism.
Views among advocates of non-sexist language are spread over a wide range, from passionate argumentation in favour, to consistent use in their own speech and writing, to occasional use. However, most people simply decide for themselves whether or not to use it in their writing.
A great many people have no opinion on non-sexist language and make no special effort to avoid what advocates may describe as sexist language. However, many terms advocated or proposed by advocates of non-sexist language, such as Ms., firefighter, or he or she, have entered the common lexicon (in some cases, before advocacy of non-sexist language began), and may be used by those who do not have any particular feeling about the subject.
Still others regard non-sexist language as revisionist, as promoting poor or heavy writing, excessively "politically correct," or simply a cosmetic change that does nothing to actually repel sexism. They may consciously refuse to use forms of speech advocated by promoters of non-sexist language. See below.
Many of the modern masculine terms in Modern English in use today originated as gender neutral terms in Old English. For example, the word 'man' was originally gender neutral and qualified to specify male or female. While the male qualification died out, the female wíf (which produced woman) survived, leaving 'man' with both its original gender-neutral meaning (people), especially in compounds such as "mankind", and its gender-specific meaning, male.
Both Ancient Greek and Classical Latin show a similar process for anthropos and homo respectively. Both of these words mean "man in general" or "human being"; as in the modern "anthropology" or "homo sapiens. For "male human as opposed to female human", there exist the separate words aner and vir, from which we get "virile". The modern descendants of the Latin homo such as French homme, Italian uomo, Spanish hombre, Romanian om are specifically male.
It should be noted that the Latin root of "human" is not homo, but humus, earth, which carries a feminine grammatical gender.
Awareness of the social effects of language was largely a 20th century phenomenon in the English-speaking world, and has been linked to the development of the principle of linguistic relativity by Benjamin Whorf and others. However, a program to rid Norwegian of sexist presuppositions dates from the mid 19th century and remains an ongoing part of Norwegian culture.
Add later history here
There are a wide range of disputed issues in the debate over 'non-sexist language'. Are there inherently sexist language forms, and if so, what are they? If they exist, should they be changed? If they should be changed, how should this be achieved?
Advocates of 'non-sexist language', including many feminists, argue that traditional language fails to reflect the presence of women in society adequately. In general, they complain about a number of issues:
Opponents of non-sexist language do not accept these arguments as valid.
A deeper variant of these arguments involves the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the suggestion that our language shapes our thought processes and that in order to eliminate sexism we would do well to eliminate "sexist" forms from our language. Some people dismiss the effectiveness of such a suggestion, viewing 'non-sexist language' as irrelevant window-dressing which merely hides sexist attitudes rather than changing them.
A tiny minority of advocates for non-sexist language argue that these "sexist" usages should be banned. It is unclear how this would be achieved. Hate speech legislation does exist in some countries, but applies to much more clear-cut and widely accepted cases of perceived prejudice. Many editing houses, corporations, and government bodies have official policies in favour of in-house use of non-sexist language. In some cases, laws exist regarding the use of non-sexist language in certain situations, such as job advertisements.
The majority of advocates for 'non-sexist language' wish to proceed by persuasion rather than enforcement. One tool of this persuasion is creating guidelines (see below) that indicate how they believe language should be used. Another tool is simply to make use of 'non-sexist language' oneself, and lead by example.
In addition to those who oppose any change, some opponents of 'non-sexist language' argue that a change in language should evolve organically from changing public attitudes towards gender issues, rather than be achieved either by enforcement, or by persuasion.
While some terms, such as firefighter and singular they, are sometimes denigrated by opponents as neologisms, they in fact have a long history that predates the beginning of the women's liberation movement. At other times new terms have indeed been created, such as Ms. or womyn. The issue is confused by satirists who invent extreme examples of the supposed consequences of 'non-sexist language', such as epersoncipation.
Some critics accuse advocates of non-sexist language of "re-gendering" language, replacing masculine in some cases by feminine terms that are equally sexist. Other critics argue that some phrases used in non-sexist language violate the rules of proper grammar and style.
Some critics claim that words like "he or she" are not real English words, for they only exist in print, not in speech. In print it is easy for an editor to employ rules of non-sexist language, but speech is practically impossible to control. People simply don't use words like "he or she" in their everyday speech; instead they use "they" or "he". Only the most determined reformer would actually use "he or she" in a casual conversation, since it would sound stilted and affected to many people.
Many linguists see words like he or she as a solution to a non-existent problem. Most English speakers happily use the singular they without thinking twice, but reformers still insist that it is a grammatical error. Nonetheless, the case for the singular they is quite compelling from a linguistic point of view. It has been in continuous use since the Middle Ages, and it was even used by the greatest English authors including Shakespeare and Chaucer. In light of this, many newer style guides are beginning to accept the singular they as grammatically correct.
Many different authorities have presented guidelines on whether, and if so and where, to use 'non-sexist language'. BambooWeb is not a style guide, so we present a selection of such sources here.
Many dictionaries, stylebooks, and some authoritative guides now counsel the writer to follow the new guidelines.
These guidelines, though accepted by many, remain in some contexts controversial, and are applied to differing degrees among English speakers worldwide. often reflecting different cultures and language structure, for example American English in contrast to British English. They are also impacted upon, depending on whether a person uses English as their first language or as a second language, regional variants or whether their form of English is based on grammatical structures inherited from a no longer widely used other language (for example, Hiberno-English) or owes its linguistic structure to earlier Old English or Elizabethan English. In these cases, language structure from their native tongue or linguistic inheritance may enter into their terminology.
The situation of 'non-sexist' usage is very different in languages that have masculine and feminine grammatical gender, such as French, German, and Spanish, simply because it is impossible to construct a gender-neutral sentence the way it can be done in English. For example, in French, the masculine gender supersedes the feminine; la femme et l'homme (the woman and the man) has the pronoun ils (they-masculine).
Accordingly, most of the focus has been on more concrete problems such as job titles. Due to the presence of grammatical gender, the strategy is the exact opposite of that of English: creating feminine job titles rather than eliminating them. This is based on the idea that it is insulting to call a woman (for example) le médecin (the (masculine) doctor), as if she changed sex or became somehow more mannish when she went to work.
Esperanto is accused of being inherently sexist, because the generic form of nouns is the same as the male form and different from the female form. E.g., doktoro = "doctor (male or unspecified sex)", doktorino = "female doctor"; also doktoroj = "doctors (male, mixed male/female, or unspecified sex)", doktorinoj = "female doctors". (This use of -in to form the feminine of nouns is reminiscent of German, e.g. Maler, Malerin = "painter".) Likewise for pronouns: as in English, li ("he") may be generic, whereas ŝi ("she") is always female.
To some critics, this aspect of the language makes the implication that masculinity is some kind of default, and femininity is an exception. The feature is particularly irksome to English speakers, since the corresponding suffix -ess is much less used in that language.
Defenders reply that this asymmetric treatment of male and female is not a feature of Esperanto, but only a general feature of most European languages. In each Romance language, for instance, grammatical genders are assigned to all nouns — even to unsexed objects, or in opposition the biological sex (as autorité = "authority" in French, guardia = "policeman" in Italian, and virilidad = "masculinity" in Spanish, which all have feminine gender). In fact, given the arbitrary assignment of grammatical gender, Romance and German speakers generally do not make the sexist assumptions claimed by the critics. Viewed in this broader context, argue the Esperantists, "sexist language" is shown to be a matter of cultural assumptions and interpretations by the speakers, not of the language per se.
Moreover, since Esperanto does not inflect adjectives for gender (as most of those languages do) it is in fact an "unsexed" (technically, gender-less) language. Indeed, it has become acceptable in Esperanto to use doktoro even to refer to a female doctor, a custom that is compatible with the standard grammar. Thus doktorino only needs to be used to emphasize femaleness; and some have even proposed the use of virdoktoro (literally "male-doctor") when one wants to emphasize maleness. As for the pronouns ŝi and li, one can use the neutral tiu ("that one") instead. The alternative ŝ/li is also used, but it has the same problems as "s/he" in English, though it is easier pronounceable. Some users also use neologisms such as ri as a gender-neutral pronoun.
Ido, a constructed languaged that is heavily based on Esperanto but seeks to avoid its shortfalls, does not have this asymetric gender-marking system. Instead, nouns in Ido for kinds of people are gender-neutral in their ordinary form, but may be made either female- or male-specific using a suffix. Examples: sekretario, secretary --- sekretariulo, man secretary --- sekretariino, woman secretary;
Finnish has only gender-neutral pronouns (it totally lacks grammatical gender). The word "hän" is completely gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". Suffix "-tar" or "-tär" can be added to some words (mostly professions) to "feminize" the word, for example näyttelijä (actor) - näyttelijätär (actress), but this is fairly uncommon. Also you can always use the basic word for both genders (näyttelijä for male and female actors).
It has been argued that Finland has been a pioneer in women right issues because it has no gender-specific pronouns: for example, it was the first European country to give women the right to vote. However, international studies show that Finns are not any more unprejudiced than users of any other language.
See also the
In French, feminine job titles are created by adding -e (l'avocate), -eure (la docteure), -euse (la travailleuse), -esse (la mairesse), or nothing in some cases such as -iste or -logue (la psychologue). More generally, "non-sexist" styles can include the use of brackets or capital letters to insert feminine endings (étudiant(e)s or étudiantEs) or repeat gendered words (toutes et tous, citoyennes et citoyens).
Words that formerly referred to a dignitary's wife (l'ambassadrice) can be used to refer to a woman in that position; this, like other "non-sexist" forms, is much more common in Quebec than in France. Although the marriage titles have mainly dropped out of use, many cite the possible confusion as a reason for continuing to use such as Madame le Président or Madame l'ambassadeur. For this reason, these remain the most frequent, at least in France. (On the other hand, an ambassador's husband would not be Monsieur l'ambassadrice.)
In German, creating a feminine job title is usually done by adding -in to the word in question. For example, the general term for computer scientist is Informatiker. The male form is unchanged: Informatiker. The female form, however, is distinguished by adding -in, giving Informatikerin.
Job descriptions in job adverts are usually formulated addressing both sexes (Informatiker oder Informatikerin). Sometimes a form of contraction with capitalization inside the word is used ("InformatikerIn"), which is considered by some people as a corruption of the language, especially if it is overdone by creating feminine forms of gender neutral words (for example a German feminist who called a group of non-feminist women Arschlöcherinnen - female assholes). The use of slashes is commonplace, too, such as in Informatiker/in.
German has three third person nominative singular pronouns: er (male), sie (female), and man (either). Man is frequently used in general statements, e.g. Man kann nicht hier parken - "One cannot park here." This pronoun man is distinguished from the noun Mann (capitalized and with two n's), which means "male adult human".
German has distinguished forms of pronouns for her and him. The use of pronouns is non-discriminatory since it distinguishes both sexes in a consistent manner rather than marking only the feminine as is done with job titles.
The traditional phraseology of the language reflects a domination of the male over the female, as in many other languages. There are fixed phrases where the male form comes first, such as man and woman (Mann und Frau). The use of Fräulein to address young women is very uncommon these days, but it lacks a male counterpart.
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