57% of Languages Do Not Have Gendered Pronouns | Hacker News Reader

57% of Languages Do Not Have Gendered Pronouns

thesocietypages.org

15 pointssamclemens13 comments

Counting by number of languages is quite useless, not least because the definition of language is so fluid. How many languages are spoken in Spain? Are British English and American English the same language? What about the "English" spoken in San Francisco vs. Alabama?

A more useful number would be the percentage of people whose primary language has gendered pronouns.

> Are British English and American English the same language? What about the "English" spoken in San Francisco vs. Alabama?

Not even different dialects, let alone languages. There are English dialects, but slightly different pronunciation and vocabulary isn't enough. If you're going to pick out anything from the US, Canada, and England as being distinct from all the rest, it would have to be AAVE.

Chinese and Japanese are both languages that only recently gained gendered third-person pronouns because of Western influences and the gender-neutral pronouns are still at least somewhat popular.

Especially in Chinese; the spoken language (Mandarin) does not have a gendered pronoun; only the written language has an optional gendered pronoun.

But really, the main conclusion to draw from this is that the Indo-European language family invented grammatical gender, which made it straightforward to assign gender to words that had no business being gendered (like "actor/actress"). Gendered pronouns are pretty rare outside of Indo-European languages.

Semitic languages also have gendered pronouns (and gender more generally throughout the language). I am not close to being a linguist, but I thought that the historical relationship between Semitic and Indo-European languages is still unclear.

I'm surprised so many languages seem to have been forgotten.

In particular, there are two dots in Spain and one in France, which means that a few are missing (Occitan, Portuguese and Breton are missing).

EDIT: The map linked in the article refers to papers as source, so it's not '57% of all languages' but '57% of all languages for which such a study exists'

This isn't quite as clear cut as it might seem. See, for example, the first comment for Mandarin:

http://wals.info/valuesets/44A-mnd

This was precisely the point I came here to make.

Saying the third person singular pronoun is gendered in Mandarin isn't quite right (the 3 characters all sound the same) -- it's gendered in Chinese characters, which is why (I assume) they didn't break things out by dialect.

Also, given how much wackiness is in French, I would assume something similar to be true -- that the male/female shows up when you write it but not when you speak it. Can we get a confirmation on that?

The third person pronoun is definitely gendered (and different, as another commenter said). It is also gendered in the third person plural (ils / elles)

There is a neutral pronoun, but it mostly is used in the same way we'd use the first person plural in English. Or to express the same thing as the 'One' in 'One can ___'.

French also has an inflection on the verbs, nouns and adjectives that are grammatical gender markers.

In both written and spoken French it doesn't really change. French is one of the most gendered languages in existence. Every noun has a gender. I'm not exactly sure of the syntax of your question but gendered pronouns are definitely both spoken and written.

In French, the he/she (il/elle) pronouns are pronounced when spoken.

This is blatant SJW psyops that has nothing to do with the nature of this website.

How are your precious bodily fluids doing.

Oh it is, is it? What does that make you? An insensitive nobody?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com