Gender-neutral pronoun

Gender-neutral, gender-inclusive or epicene pronouns are pronouns that neither reveal nor imply the gender or the sex of a person. Androgynous pronouns are pronouns that can refer to neither or both genders.

Most languages do not have gender distinctions as an intrinsic part of the language: though it is always possible to specify whether one is talking about a male or female, the language does not require one to make that choice.[1] In such languages, all pronouns are "gender-neutral".

In some languages — notably most Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic and Niger-Congo languages — some personal pronouns intrinsically distinguish male from female; and the selection of a pronoun necessarily specifies at least to some extent the gender of what is referred to. Most such languages only distinguish gender in the third person. Outside the Afro-Asiatic family (where it is normal to have gender distinctions in at least the second person, as in Arabic and Hausa) there are only a handful of languages with gender distinctions in other persons. Since at least 1795,[2] some people have felt this requirement to be unsatisfactory (see Gender-neutral language) and there have been attempts to devise sets of pronouns which do not require the speaker to make the distinction, since sometime around 1850.[3] These are what is usually meant by gender-neutral pronouns.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is often interpreted to mean that people will be less sexist if they do not distinguish gender in pronouns or other aspects of speech. Patriarchal societies with genderless languages, such as the Chinese, demonstrate that gendered pronouns are not a prerequisite for inequality to exist.