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English (as most Indo-European languages) has a gender-neutral third person pronoun, it, but it is typically not used for people; if one wants to be gender neutral, one is often stuck using he or she.

Is there group of languages which make no distinction between gender in third person pronouns, and has no "gendered" pronouns?

That is, instead of saying "Talk to him." they would instead say "Talk to that/it." If they wanted to make a distinction between gender, they would need to define the subject/target rather than use a pronoun, e.g. "Talk to the man."

curiousdannii
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IQAndreas
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    Your "most languages" is entirely wrong. I suspect you are limiting your purview to Indo-European languages. – Colin Fine May 13 '14 at 23:16
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    @ColinFine You are entirely correct, I am Indo-Europeally biased. The question's wording has been corrected. – IQAndreas May 13 '14 at 23:17
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    Its worth noting that english does have the singular they for this purpose. For example, "if a customer comes in then give them a free sample". People wrongly believe that it is a new usage but it has existed since at least the 14th century. Its only appropriate for an uncertain or generic person though so its not exactly equivalent – Richard Tingle May 14 '14 at 08:08
  • I think that question is too broad because of lack of precision in wording. I suppose, you don't ask about languages without gender concept, but about languages, that do have a gender, but only 1 pronoun for for 3rd person? –  May 14 '14 at 10:13
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    As has been noted, there are many languages that meet the condition. In my language, Yoruba, He came, She came and It came all translate to O wa. – afaolek May 15 '14 at 11:10
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    @RichardTingle Could you give a source of that usage in 14th century? – user58955 May 15 '14 at 12:02
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    @user58955 The wikipedia article contains several references to that fact. However they are book references so I can't link to them directly: "The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-43146-8. pp. 493–494." and "A Student's Introduction to English Grammar. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521848374. p. 178." – Richard Tingle May 15 '14 at 12:05
  • @user58955 You will so find Chaucer using "hem" in the Canterbury Tales. – Marcin May 15 '14 at 17:27
  • One would certainly think this would be possible. I wonder what language one would use? – jp2code May 16 '14 at 15:16
  • @RichardTingle: I’m a big fan of singular they too, but one shouldn’t overstate the extent to which it gives a direct replacement for he or she, as a gender-neutral 3ps pronoun. For many (?most) speakers, it’s only grammatical in contexts where the referent is either generic, or of unknown gender; so e.g. If a customer comes in, give them a sample is fine, but **If Jane comes in, give them a sample* is ungrammatical. Discussion at Language Log. – PLL Jul 30 '14 at 16:49
  • @RichardTingle sure, there are some sentence constructs that require a singular they. Can't think of any off the top of my head. Wouldn't "he" be the appropriate gender neutral pronoun in that context? For a female speaker, it would be "she". – ZeroPhase Mar 29 '24 at 06:02
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    @ZeroPhase in old fashioned text "he" might be used to mean "he or she" but trying to use "he" as a gender neutral pronoun these days is likely to offend people. It's also just a weird thing to do like saying "trains means trains or cars". (And to be honest I think most older writing was expecting he to only apply to men and women to just not be involved) – Richard Tingle Mar 29 '24 at 06:19
  • @RichardTingle Yeah, I don't care about offending those people. I wrote my college English grammar paper on why "the he/she nonsense should never be used in place of 'he' or 'she'" The main argument of the paper was those people are objectively wrong, and they should be reminded they are wrong and never listened to to preserve aesthetically pleasing language patterns.

    And sorry, I was referring to "he" / "she" referring to people. "she" is used for boats and stuff like that. I only use "he" on occasion for objects. most likely based off of the sentence sounding right.

     – ZeroPhase Mar 30 '24 at 07:12
  • What I meant was there are times I do think singular "they" is right, but that's extremely rare and just based on sentence flow. Personally, I think for a third person gender neutral pronoun English should adopt some version of Heidegger's "Dasein," and trim it down to work as a pronoun in English. That literally means 'being," which is what they're looking for. Also works for animals. "they" is just the wrong word. Mostly, people are defending an emotional reaction over a word choice, rather than thinking of language construction logically. – ZeroPhase Mar 30 '24 at 07:29
  • Richard Stallman also has a good essay on "per" being an option, and a bunch of super confusing sentences using "they" as a third person pronoun. "per" already has a history in English for this purpose. It just never picked up popularity for some reason among feminists trying to address the problem in the 70s. – ZeroPhase Mar 30 '24 at 07:34

17 Answers17

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The World Atlas of Language Structures has a feature about gender distinctions in personal pronouns. According to it, there are at least 254 languages without gender distinctions and even 2 with gender distinctions in 1st and 2nd, but not 3rd person pronouns (Iraqw and Burunge).

Max Ionov
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    Even Farsi (an Indo-European language) has no gender - either grammatical or in the pronouns. – Francis Davey May 14 '14 at 10:20
  • Interesting. Is this a well-known typological universal (a stochastic entailment hierarchy)? – user3503 May 16 '14 at 15:11
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    Armenian (also Indo-European) has no gender distinction in third person personal pronouns, which made translating the title of the movie "He and She" a bit difficult ("նա և նա") – Armen Tsirunyan Jul 13 '14 at 20:05
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There are many such languages. Examples include Turkic languages (as kiyoshigaang's answer mentions), Uralic languages (such as Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian), spoken Mandarin and Cantonese, and doubtless many others. Languages which lack grammatical gender generally will usually lack gendered third-person pronouns specifically (although there are exceptions to this, such as English).

TKR
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    Gendered pronouns were only introduced into Chinese in the 20th century (and, as you said, the distinction is only made in writing). – 200_success May 14 '14 at 06:27
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    I have a friend who grew up in Estonia under the Soviet Union. She originally read the Bible in Estonian. It wasn't until after the wall fell and she was finally able to be in contact with Christians from other countries that she realized that in all gendered languages, both God and Jesus are generally considered male. So yeah, Estonian is certainly one of those languages. – Jenny D May 14 '14 at 06:37
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    Japanese is another language that lacks grammatical gender, but still has gendered third-person pronouns. (Technically, I think Japanese just considers everything a noun, not a pronoun, but it still counts.) –  May 14 '14 at 14:42
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    When written, 佢 for Cantonese is not gendered, unlike 她/它/祂/他 – kwaalaateimaa Feb 18 '21 at 02:40
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In the Finnish language we do not have separate words for him/her but instead use the word "hän" to refer to a person of either gender. For finns learning English it can be a challenge to understand that when you refer to a third person you'll also need to specify their gender.

a Finn
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    And for Scandinavians in general, it is an extra challenge that the unisex pronoun in Finnish is phonetically extremely similar to the uniquely masculine pronoun han in Scandiwegian (this is especially the case in Danish where han is pronounced [ha̱n] or [hæn], i.e., almost identically to how it’s pronounced in Finnish). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Sep 20 '15 at 14:54
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Turkish doesn't have gender in third person pronouns. For example, if one says "Onu, okulda gördüm.", it can interpreted either "I saw her at school" or " I saw him at school".

kiyoshigaang
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    Just what I was looking for! Are there other languages with a similar root as Turkish which share this trait? – IQAndreas May 13 '14 at 23:06
  • TKR tells almost all the languages which are similar to Turkish. I can't say much about Uralic languages, but Turkic languages lack grammatical gender and gendered third-person, as far as I know. – kiyoshigaang May 13 '14 at 23:15
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North Indian Languages, eg. Hindi/Urdu (Indo-European). Even though there are gendered nouns, there are no gendered pronouns. Even first (मैं) and second (तुम-informal/आप-formal) person pronouns are gender-neutral. All nouns are gendered, though. For example, a table (मेज़) is feminine while a pen (कलम) is masculine.

  • वह आदमी है। (He’s a man.)
  • वह औरत है। (She’s a woman.)
  • वह कुर्सी है। (It’s a chair.)
Alex C.
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    IMO just saying "Hindi/Urdu" would have been better than mentioning "North Indian languages". If you meant to make a statement about Indo-Aryan languages as a whole, you're flat-out wrong: Marathi, for instance, has a three-way gender distinction in its third-person pronouns, while Bengali has no gender distinctions at all. – Anubhav C May 14 '14 at 14:35
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    Anubhav Chattoraj: I had Hindustani, Bhojpuri, Bengali, and possibly Punjabi in mind—and I meant exactly what I wrote—North Indian Languages, not Indo-Aryan Languages. Thanks for the heads-up regarding Marathi. Hindustani, Bhojpuri, and Bengali all have genderless pronouns. The example was to illustrate the possibly unique position of Hindustani (vis-a-vis Bengali and in contrast to tri-gendered Sanskrit, for example), that has bi-gendered nouns but non-gendered pronouns. – Alex C. May 15 '14 at 05:00
  • Even Konkani has only two genders, Neuter is either masculine or feminine depending on context. – pramodc84 Aug 26 '14 at 04:11
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  • Georgian lacks gender specific third person pronouns:

    • ის (is) covers "he", "she", "it"; and also "this".
    • იგი (igi) covers "he" and "she".

  • Mongolian is another language that doesn't specify gender in third person pronouns:

    • тэр (ter) is a deictic / demonstrative meaning "that", and is covers "he", "she", and "it".
hippietrail
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The majority of languages in the world do not have grammatical gender and do not distinguish between masculine and feminine forms of the pronoun. Those that do distinguish belong to the Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic families, plus a very small number of other single languages. For this reason it is futile to draw up a long list of languages that do NOT have gendered pronouns (Turkish, Finnish…..). It would be more useful to ask which non-Indo-European and non-Afro-Asiatic languages DO have gendered pronouns.

fdb
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    One might also ask which Indo-European languages do not have gendered pronouns. Hindi/Urdu has already been mentioned, but Persian has no gendered pronouns either. – Jan Apr 03 '19 at 10:32
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Adding to the list of individual languages here, Adyghe (Northwest Caucasian) has a third person a 'that' used for 3rd person, and Quechua languages do so too, e.g., pay 's/he' in northern varieties.

Ivan Kapitonov
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3

In Hungarian, ő means both "he" and "she", and also "it".

Daniel Hershcovich
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    This seems like a good answer, but can you expand it with some examples? Answers that consist of only a single sentence are discouraged on SE. – robert May 15 '14 at 22:11
  • This is incorrect. ő is always 3rd person, and never an object. But indeed genderless. For an object, the word az is used instead, which is equivalent to "that". – Daniel Dinnyes Aug 05 '22 at 14:40
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Aymara also lacks gender in the third person pronouns. Both 'she' and 'he' are expressed with the word jupa. A sentence like 'talk to him' is given morphologically: talk-2subj.3obj. Stress the gender of the third person in this sentence can only be achieved by adding an additional noun to the sentence (inflected in the dative), e.g. 'man', 'brother', 'boy'.

Teusz
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Many (most?) sign languages indicate pronouns by indexing, that is, pointing at a region of space which is assigned the meaning of the referent. The referent of an index can be a person, an object, or an abstract concept (i.e., the meanings of he, she, and it). Multiple separate referents can be used, by pointing to different areas, which means that you essentially have available an unlimited number of distinct gender-neutral pronouns. (That is, there's no theoretical limit; in practice, there's a limit to how many you can hold in memory and how many you can make distinct.)

Sign languages may also adopt vocabulary from the surrounding spoken language, especially if children are taught a signed encoding of the spoken language (Signed Exact English or similar). Irish Sign Language, for example, does have lexical signs for he, she, and it, but they are rarely used, with indexing being by far the most common way to use pronouns.

TRiG
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Spoken Sinhala has "eya" which is used in place of the English "he"/"she". It also has gender specific words but in the spoken language I've never heard them used. Some native Sinhala speakers have difficulty separating "he"/"she" in English and use "he" for females with or without auto-correcting to "her". I believe that in written Sinhala there is gender distinction for third person pronouns.

CJ Dennis
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Indonesian Language is. We don't use any third person pronouns. For example, we can use "Dia memakai sepatu" or in English "He/She is wearing shoes". So the word of "Dia" is sometime biased, between "He" or "She". And for your information, Indonesian Language or in simply most people say "Bahasa" is so interesting. It has no any specific intonation to describe the homophones. And the grammar is so simple. If you want to study about Bahasa, I will tech you then :)

Yoshua Joo Bin
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    “Dia” is a third person pronoun, isn’t it ? – Nicolas Barbulesco May 15 '14 at 15:47
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    Maybe what he meant was that "We don't use any gender in third person pronouns"? Because it's true that "dia" is a third person pronoun and gender neutral. And, AFAIK, there's another one, "ia". But, again AFAIK, "ia"'s usage in daily conversation is very uncommon (commonly used in literature), and I also don't know the differences between their usage (I found some, but no trusted sources). – Konayuki May 15 '14 at 18:05
  • There are many 3rd person pronouns in Indonesian; Pronoun is an open class in Malay, and any noun that can refer to a human being can be used as a personal pronoun. The narrator in Lat's famous Malaysian book Budak Kampung 'The Kampung Boy', for instance, uses teman 'friend' to refer to himself when narrating his story. But unless one uses a feminine or masculine noun in Malay (e.g, perempuan 'woman, lady' or laki-laki '(masculine) man'), no pronoun is marked for gender. – jlawler Nov 21 '16 at 20:39
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Mari language (an Uralic language) doesn't have gender in third person pronouns. Sometimes it crops up when they (usually villagers) speak Russian, as they sometimes confuse "he" and "she":

"He's waiting for you."

"He?"

"Natasha!"

carsten
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In addittion to the vast majority of Fenno-Ugric languages already mentioned here (of which perhaps only Estonian with its tema was left unmentioned), Modern Standard Chinese does not distinguish animate / inanimate and/or masculine / feminine in the 3rd person singular, either.

That is to say, the word ta1 (first tone) is pronounced similar in every tone, but the actual meaning is to be guessed either by a context in oral speech or by the character for the word:

它 = it

他 = he

她 = she

Every one of these free characters is pronounced alike (ta in the first tone).

Manjusri
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0

In Tamil (தமிழ்), we have the following third person pronouns:

  • Masculine He - அவன், இவன்

  • Feminine She - அவள், இவள்

  • Gender-neutral He/She (singular) - அவர், இவர் (Both are gender neutral honorifics)

  • Gender-neutral (plural) - அவர்கள் / இவர்கள்

vvg
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This is what, apparently distinguishes the old world languages from the new.

In Swahili, a language whose origin is shrouded in mystery, there is no such gender distinction. In fact there is no 'gender' at all in its grammar but rather class distinction. Its grammar posses 8 classes and 1 class is to distinguish living things but not plants which fall in another class.

Example, 'kaja', an act of coming, could mean 'he came' or 'she came' of if the context was about a bird or a dog then it would mean the dog came or the bird came.

The other 7 classes go into an elaborate distinction of objects and concepts.

A similar languages would be Sanskrit, of which almost all the European languages are founded on which had 16 classes, but it is not a living language anymore.

This distinction of classes is not merely the addition of a single word in the sentence such as he or she like in English but rather modifying the entire sentence with the class key word in such a way that every word in the sentence denotes the object being spoken about.

The language also has pre-fixes and suffixes just like any other but it also has inter-fixes interspersed between words as well as size distinction.

Example, 'mtu' is a person, 'jitu' is a superlative, a very big person and 'kijitu' is a small person.

And best of all these distinctions are merely simple syllable. In fact the entire grammar of the language is based on them.

I hope this helps.

Khalfan
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    Be careful about the old vs new world distinction. Finnish or Hungarian (or even Turkish) could hardly be classified as new world languages. – Dominik Lukes May 14 '14 at 08:15
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    Nor is English "founded on" Sanskrit (they almost certainly both have a common ancestor, but that is a different thing). – Francis Davey May 14 '14 at 10:19
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    Nor does Sanskrit have "sixteen classes". It has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). – Anubhav C May 14 '14 at 14:40
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    Sorry, but this is nonsense. Swahili's origins aren't "shrouded in mystery", it's East Bantu plus a whole lot of Arabic influence creating a trade language. It has eighteen classes (depending on dialect), and class and gender mean exactly the same thing in this context. Kaja doesn't mean what you think it means; you probably meant kuja, but that's a noun, not a verb: "he/she came" is alikuja. And that "size distinction" (which in the dialects I'm familiar with would give kitu, not *kijitu) is just the noun classes again. Finally, Sanskrit is utterly unrelated to Swahili. – Draconis Mar 28 '19 at 02:18
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    P.S. Not all animals (or even all people) are in class 1, either: see ndege "bird", paka "cat" in class 9; kilema "disabled person", kitoto "infant" in class 7. Similarly, not everything in class 1 is a person: mnyama "animal", mdudu "insect". – Draconis Mar 28 '19 at 02:22
  • "he came" or "she came" would be amekuja. Not sure what kaja is but it's not a Swahili verb – Omar and Lorraine Mar 28 '19 at 08:49
  • There's also a new world language that does have a gender distinction like Tunica, Yuchi, and Mohawk. – Xwtek May 03 '19 at 00:45