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I know a little Arabic, and I also know English. They both have the notion of "gender" built into their syntax. I am Persian and I speak Farsi, which does not have "gender" built into its grammar.

In those languages which have gender, sometimes masculine gender is used to refer to both genders (male and female).

For example, in English, we might say "anyone who leads his team correctly, gets a reward". This includes both men and women.

Does this pattern have a technical name? I want to study about it, but I can't search as I don't know a keyword to find results.

Sir Cornflakes
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Saeed Neamati
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    it's kinda beside the point, but fyi using "his" in this sense sounds really old-fashioned in English. "They" has been an acceptable pronoun in this case since Middle English, and has been the usual one for centuries. The "rule" that you should use "he" here was made up by 18th & 19th century grammarians who believed that Latin grammar was somehow better than English grammar, and so English grammar should be adjusted to better reflect Latin norms – Tristan Feb 12 '21 at 10:14
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    Italian (and I guess Spanish, French, and probably Romanian too) really have generic masculine, that is, the 'standard' way to refer to a generic gender is with the masculine form. Some Italian and Spanish speakers started using @ or * as a suffix to make words gender-neutral (since in those languages grammatic gender is often determined by the last vowel of a word). Example in Italian: ragazzi (boys), ragazze (girls), ragazz* (a group of boys and girls). Same in Spanish: chicos, chicas, chic@s. – seldon Feb 12 '21 at 18:18
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    To really include both men and women, you should say: "anyone who leads their team correctly, gets a reward" – Patrick Feb 12 '21 at 18:19
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    @mattecapu I see the "chic@s" style a lot on my South American friends' social media posts. Can it be used in speech? As far as I know it's not pronounceable. – WaterMolecule Feb 12 '21 at 19:07
  • I know some Italian folks resort to /Ə/ to pronounce something ambiguous enough to look both like an 'a' and an 'o'. I've never heard it in the while though. Same for Spanish. – seldon Feb 12 '21 at 19:21
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    Mark Twain complained about this sort of thing in German: "In German, a young lady [das Mädchen] has no sex, while a turnip [die Rübe] has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl." – Darrel Hoffman Feb 12 '21 at 20:55
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    @Tristan I disagree that epicene "he/him/his" sounds old fashioned. I didn't even notice it in the sentence the first time I read it, although I would write it as "they/them/their". – CJ Dennis Feb 12 '21 at 23:25
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    @Tristan despite all the upvotes on your comment "they" has NOT been the usual pronoun for centuries. It wasn't even the usual pronoun 40 years ago. I know because I was alive then. There's nothing wrong with "they", and I have no problem with it. But I have a problem with revisionist history. Pretending that this was not common practice recently trivializes the problem. – barbecue Feb 13 '21 at 15:04
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    @WaterMolecule I have heard it pronounced as a Spanish e as if the word had been written chiques. I have also seen Spanish feminists seriously encourage the use of persona(s) with pronoun ella(s) as a generic feminine that includes men, though they were less serious when saying una persona varona and the female pronoun ella should be used for a male person – Henry Feb 13 '21 at 22:36
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    @barbecue I believe Tristan’s point was more about centuries prior to the 18th/19th/20th. And my memories don’t quite reach 40 years back, but near enough (still predates the recent interest in gender and pronouns), and while I agree that singular they is new-ish, in at least some contexts their was always acceptable in my experience (for my childhood, that would be NYC). Not even as a gender issue, it was just how people spoke for whatever reason without thinking about it. – KRyan Feb 14 '21 at 01:24
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    @barbecue "The word they (with its counterparts them, their, and themselves) as a singular pronoun to refer to a person of unspecified gender has been used since at least the 14th century". If you have an authoritative source which disagrees with the Oxford English Dictionary then please feel free to supply it. – Aaron F Feb 14 '21 at 12:19
  • Tristan assures us that use of ‘they’ as a generically inclusive pronoun “has been...acceptable...in this case since Middle English” and so “English grammar should be adjusted to better reflect Latin norms”. As my professors at university used to say: it is more useful to be descriptive than prescriptive grammarians. Ergo, unconvinced. Healthy to have these discussions - thank you for your contribution. Aldous – Phil Oram Feb 14 '21 at 01:49
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    @AaronF "has been used" doesn't support the claim that it "has been the usual one for centuries". The same paragraph you cite explicitly goes on to mention that this usage has become more prevalent only in the past few decades. – hiccups Feb 15 '21 at 01:43
  • it has become more prevalent because the efforts of those grammarians to get rid of it were relatively successful and generations of people were gaslit into believing that a perfectly normal usage was incorrect. The only innovative thing with singular they at the moment is the use of it for specific known people where the gender is known to the speaker – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 09:57
  • it's also important to distinguish cases of a genuine generic masculine with no assumption as to the referent's gender, and cases where the masculine is used because the referent is assumed to be male. Historically in a great many cases, the assumption that the referent is male has been fairly reliable and hence commonplace – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 10:01
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    @AaronF From the very same link you provided... "In the late 20th century, as the traditional use of he to refer to a person of either gender came under scrutiny on the grounds of sexism, this use of they became more common." – barbecue Feb 15 '21 at 16:08
  • an innovation can become traditional after long enough. And after a couple of centuries of insistence by grammarians, the generic masculine had become associated with the establishment and was certainly felt to be traditional, even if it was an innovation – Tristan Feb 15 '21 at 16:24
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    Just an observation. In Russian, the word for “everyone” can be put into any of the 3 genders: каждый (masc.), каждая (fem.), каждое (neut.), and when you speak about people/mankind in general (“Everyone knows that ...” or “Everyone should ...”) it's only the masculine form which is used, although women are included too. Using the feminine form in such cases is ungrammatical in Russian. The only way to sound gender-neutral is to use something plural instead, e.g. все “all” since in plural the gender isn't specified. – Yellow Sky Feb 21 '21 at 06:43

2 Answers2

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This strategy to deal with person groups of mixed gender or with single persons of unknown or undetermined gender is named generic masculine. It is quite frequent among languages with grammatical gender.

Sir Cornflakes
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    Because of the sexism involved with a generic masculine, some writers will choose to use a generic feminine for balance, which is fair, but admittedly suffers from the same shortcomings. Some languages possess neutral/inclusive pronouns, such as "their" in English (also used by the OP), and "hen" in Swedish. These can be used to address this imbalance or more complex and inadequate solutions like "he/she" (because they don't take non-binary genders into account). – Xano Feb 13 '21 at 09:37
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    @Xano Except that most of the times, native speakers consider generic masculine as something without a real gender, while any feminine will always be feminine and never generic. Using a "generic" feminine is in a sense more sexistic as it is almost always understood to include only women, while a generic masculine is almost never understood to include only men. – IS4 Feb 15 '21 at 01:58
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    For a counterpoint, https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html. – Patrick Stevens Feb 15 '21 at 12:15
  • What native speakers consider, changes over time, and it is fine for people to explore alternative words and phrases to avoid bias, whether that bias has been common for a long time or not.

    @PatrickStevens That article is amazing in how out of touch it is. Out of the many, many fallacies and willful misunderstandings of the world and language, I'd like to point out that the author is unaware that the singular "they" has been a thing for quite some time now (source: https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/).

     – Xano Feb 15 '21 at 12:20
  • @Xano Valid points, but my answer concentrates on the terminology question here and gives the technical term. I neither make a judgement about the strategy nor do I discuss whether it is an appropriate description of Modern English. – Sir Cornflakes Feb 15 '21 at 13:18
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    @Xano I'll grant that the race analogy is at best a fraught one, but surely you are not reading that essay as being opposed to gender-neutral language? – Gregory J. Puleo Feb 15 '21 at 14:12
  • @Xano Yes, I would be interested in hearing what you think the purpose of this piece by "William Satire" is, because it sounds like you disagree with the author's own postscript about what the piece is there for. – Patrick Stevens Feb 15 '21 at 14:27
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The masculine gender/noun class in many languages will be the unmarked option, with other genders/classes being marked. It is often (though not always) possible to use a less marked gender/class. Sometimes a noun might have a marked gender, but other words with agreement affixes might use a less marked gender. One example is Biblical Greek, in which certain adjectives (third declension) have a distinct neuter form, but not a distinct feminine form, and so will take the unmarked gender when agreeing with feminine nouns.

I'm pretty sure I've seen examples before of languages where the noun classes form a hierarchy of markedness which can be illustrated with venn diagrams, to show how marked classes will collapse into their parent classes in some situations, but I can't remember which languages were like that.

curiousdannii
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