>Is there as much of a gender "confusion" (for lack of a better word) in parts of the world that use languages that have gendered nouns?

As someone who speaks a Slavic language with masculine, feminine and neuter genders (Croatian), I've never heard of anyone identifying as non-binary in my language. It'd be extremely difficult because all adjectives and verbs in some tenses change based on the gender of the person in question. Singular they wouldn't work because it's already used to formally refer to someone (similar to German Sie). You'd have to rethink half of the language to not gender someone, which no one is going to do for such a niche problem.

One thing I see Anglophones do when talking about other languages is confuse neuter gender for gender neutral, which equates to calling someone an "it".

>...English doesn't use gendered nouns so maybe we have less deeply entrenched ideas about gender and what is masculine or what is feminine...

That's another thing Anglophones get wrong. At least in my language, when not talking about people, 99% of the time the gender is determined by the ending (suffix?) of the word it's referring to, not some mystical gender role we imbue that object with. When using the word human, the rest of the sentence refers to them as male, whereas if you're using the word person, it'd be female even if you're using them to talk about the same guy.

One other thing is, when referring to a mixed group of people, you use a masculine form of plural, same as "latinos". It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.

> It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.

May depend on place and culture. I recall my French teacher in 4th grade got snide about this while explaining that even a single man in a group will turn the group masculine. She was francophone.

This certainly bothers anglos much much more though.

It doesn't turn the group masculine, it turns the word used to the masculine plural, which is the generic word for a group of people.

But if you take sciences, for example, it's plural feminine in French and Italian.

If you put a masculine discipline in the group, for example "law" which is masculine in Italian (il diritto), the group of disciplines is still referred to as feminine "le scienze"

It's a matter of gender of the plural word, it has nothing to do with biological sex.

Thanks! Good points. I half wonder if my teacher’s grievance didn’t come from living in a majority anglo culture.

I remember when I realized this learning Spanish that it made me a little sad that I could only ever be part of ellos and not ellas.

At least in Quebec, objection to the use of the masculine form of the plural at some universities led to renaming organizations, to say for example students (female) and students (male). For an example see

https://sogeecom.org/

"Société générale des étudiantes et étudiants du Collège de Maisonneuve"

> One other thing is, when referring to a mixed group of people, you use a masculine form of plural, same as "latinos". It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.

This is the traditional rule in Hebrew as well and it most certainly bothers people. Lately I've seen a lot of writing and occasionally even speech that attempts to be gender neutral by using the Hebrew equivalent of "he/she" or "he or she" and sometimes "she or he". Hebrew has a lot more gender than English, so it's pervasive.

For example, at work I might get an email that starts: Dear employees (female suffix) and employees (male suffix)...

P.S. This trend is often associated with a certain popular feminist politician and has been the subject of jokes in political comedy, eg: https://youtu.be/cu3E9Nf_Z6w

> For example, at work I might get an email that starts: Dear employees (female suffix) and employees (male suffix)...

This sort of thing is also very common in Spanish, French, and German (at least).

That resonates a lot with my observations as a native brazilian portuguese speaker. The gender of a thing has to do with how the word ends (o for male, a for female, e and r are a bit more tricky).

Yet we have imported the whole gender neutral language agenda. I find it interesting, because the changes to the language would be way more drastic.

While I'd also be curious of the same, I'd like to also point out that the relationship between grammatical gender and biological sex is often strenuous, even in languages where these exist and are nominally tied.

For example, in Romanian (a Romance language), the scientific words for 'penis' and 'vagina' are both neuter (which in Romanian means that they use masculine form for the singular, and feminine form for the plural). Conversely, the vulgar words for these are both feminine. The word for 'breast/breasts' is masculine.

Basically only words that specifically refer to people and mammals&birds are guaranteed to have a meaningful relationship between grammatical gender and male/female sex. Even here it is not entirely guaranteed, as the words for 'child' and 'baby' are both masculine, even though they are used for both male and female (or intersex) babies and children - though there are of course specific words for 'boy' and 'girl' and those do have the expected gender.

On the other hand, what is clear is that gendered languages with two genders have a huge problem with the idea of gender-neutral language, as it is simply impossible to refer to someone without implying a gender. For example, if I had a non-binary colleague and I wanted to say that they are smart, I have to choose between calling them 'deștept' (masculine) or 'deșteaptă' (feminine) - there is simply no other form of the word to use. Even if I were to artificially introduce a plural like with 'they/them' in English, I would have to choose between 'deștepți' (masculine) or 'deștepte' (feminine) - there is no getting away from this.

This comes into the forced language changes like "LatinX". On paper, changes like this are fine, but in use they only wok on paper. In use they still have to be identified as "Soy un LatinX" or "Soy una LatinX" (sorry if my Spanish is a little rusty), but the definitive article is still male or female. While in your example above, Americans (as I am) seem eager to change individual words in a language and culture to bend it to our will and white wash it (and no, I'm not on board with this. Deleting a cultural language won't fix a problem of oppression, which are not limited to cultures with gendered languages), it still does not remove the "gendered" aspects of the language in many cases.

> This comes into the forced language changes like "LatinX". On paper, changes like this are fine, but in use they only wok on paper. In use they still have to be identified as "Soy un LatinX" or "Soy una LatinX" (sorry if my Spanish is a little rusty)

Not really. “Latinx/Latin(x)/LatinX”, in both English and Spanish (though it seems to be used less in Spanish, even by people who use it in English [0]) is usually, perhaps exclusively, used as an adjective, not a noun.

[0] e.g., I’ve see groups use things like “Soy Yo Latino / I Am LatinX”.

> “Latinx/Latin(x)/LatinX”, in both English and Spanish (though it seems to be used less in Spanish, even by people who use it in English [0]) is usually, perhaps exclusively, used as an adjective, not a noun.

If it is indeed used only as an adjective, it would make sense to see it very rarely in Spanish, as Spanish already dictates which gender to use for an adjective - if you want to say 'a latinx movie' in English to avoid using Latino/Latina, that makes some sense; but in Spanish, 'una pelicula latino' would never make sense, so why use 'latinx' instead of the normal agreement 'latina'?

Even in English, the use of it as an adjective for anything except personal identity (specifically, a way to identify personal ethnic identity in a way which was inclusive of non-binary gender identity) seems to be a step detached from its original origin taken by media adopters who just do a global find and replace to swap it for Latino and/or Latina without considering context.

Not quite on the level of an American college newspaper I saw in the 1990s that identified Winnie Mandela as an African-American speaker when she was making an appearance, but the same kind of process.

In Russian, gender confusion is mostly about professions (the rest of the gender system makes no sense, like a car is "she" but the plane is "he" -- so no one bothers with it).

For example, the word for "doctor" is, well, "doktor". But the word is masculine. There's a feminine derivation, "doctorsha" - "female doctor" -- but it sounds somewhat condenscending to me, like you doubt her competence. "Oh this doktorsha prescribed me wrong pills again".

So the neutral, respectful way to refer to a female doctor is to refer to her using the "neutral" masculine form "doktor". And it doesn't sound odd to me at all. But here's where the fun starts: adjectives need to agree in gender with their noun. And the correct grammar is "good (masc.) doctor (masc)". However, there's a recent trend to have it like "good (fem.) doctor (masc)". I.e. the grammar is completely bonkers but somehow it sounds acceptable to my ear.

In Spain's Spanish we ended up with "new" feminine forms for professionals. Now it's commonplace but some of them sounded pretty strange back then.

For instance you talked about female doctors using "la médico". It's perfectly natural to change that to "la médica", yet you referred to the guard as "el/la guardia" and we still do, we don't talk about a masculine "el guardio".

Here's the funny thing: we had/have "juez" for judge, and albeit is was ordinarily masculine it's not an obvious masculine form according to phonological conventions, so "el/la juez" was common and sounded very right. Then female judges started to prefer the new form "jueza" that sounded awful (it still does), but we ended up adopting it because it's their prerogative anyway, who can argue about that?

It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing.

>It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing.

Exactly. Now that I think about it more, it's not so black-and-white in Russian. As I said above, the female form of "doctor" doesn't sound acceptable/neutral, but the female form of "football player" sounds completely neutral. So go figure.

> the rest of the gender system makes no sense, like a car is "she" but the plane is "he" -- so no one bothers with it

It's actually pretty straightforward. Generally, nouns ending with an "a" are feminine, with an "o" are neuter, the rest are masculine.

I meant that no one pays attention that, for example, a teapot is "he", there's no meaning behind it.

>Generally, nouns ending with an "a" are feminine, with an "o" are neuter, the rest are masculine.

It's a rule of thumb, but it's incomplete.

"Starosta" & Co. are masculine, neuter nouns also end in -e (except for "kofe"); nouns which end in a palatalized consonant can be either feminine or masculine; there are words like "sudia" or "umnica" which can be masc. or fem.; some words like "nozhnicy" only have plural form and don't have gender.

I’m really struggling to find the interview on YouTube. I don’t remember the interviewees name.

It’s was a Chinese activist or historian. And she was basically saying that many Asian societies had queer people long before the westerners came. And while it wasn’t really out in the open as such, everyone lived how they liked and it was ok.

The problems started when the westerners came and started having to label everything.

I’m not going to try and mangle the reasons she gave why labels caused problems.

I am a fairly militant, pronouns-in-my-bio (he/him, cishet) post-colonial feminazi and I think so-called politically correct language is generally a good thing. But I also have a degree in linguistics, and I have to say I don't think gendered grammatical categories (that is distinctions in pronouns, noun classes, verbal conjugations, etc. that align with cultural concepts of binary gender) have any effect on gender relations in a culture at all.

The (Classical) Arabic language is fairly unique in the Muslim world in expressing gender grammatically in several ways. For instance, in addition to a he/she distinction, there are separate second-person pronouns ("you") for use when addressing men and women, as well as matching, gendered forms of the verb. That is, you can't speak to someone without encoding their gender grammatically, sometimes even several times in the sentence.

Compare this to Turkish and Persian, where gender is not expressed at all except for some words. There are separate words for man and woman, and male and female family relations but that's about it. There's one third person pronoun, so you can write love poems that are completely gender-ambiguous (indeed, much classic Persian poetry can be read as being either about love of another person or about devotion to God). As far as I understand, Turkish even has many names that are gender-neutral. Bahasa Indonesian and its related languages are also free from grammaticalized gender.

And while there are many differences between all aspects of society in the Islamic world, including gender relations, if gendered language was an important factor, I would expect them to be much more aligned with linguistic boundaries, and I have never seen even the tiniest shred of evidence for that.

Bahasa Indonesian is quite interesting, by the way, in that it and languages of that family (that Austronesian languages) have interesting ways of encoding social information grammatically. You might have more than one first person pronoun ("I") that are appropriate in different contexts, and the relative social status between the speaker, the addressee, and the subject are encoded in various ways. I can only assume that Indonesian letters to the editor about the lack of respect that young people have for their elders are full of just-so linguistic argumentation, and that the inevitable clashes between generations have elements of linguistic reform. But at least when trans people gain recognition there, they won't have to argue about pronouns.

The language being gendered doesn't really matter: Wokeness is primarily a cultural fashion of American baizuo, and as such woke ideas are prevalent in places where people try to fashion themselves as baizuo. Even inside America, it's the domain of terminally online upper-class whites and little else.

A far more fundamental correlation than the genderedness of language is, I think, abstraction. The classic baizuo type is terminally online, and sees words as defining the world. If you can make a sentence and replace one word with another of the same class, you should just treat them as equal because you grammatically can. Whether the real-world things the words point at are remotely similar enough is irrelevant, since to the woke, the real world isn't primary. They live in the world of words.

Most people in the world, of course, inhabit a precisely opposite situation: Physical reality is primary, and words are first and foremost pointers to things in that physical world. To people more bound in reality, woke fashions are by and large absurd. You can see it within the States too.

I doubt it, except perhaps as some sort of re-analysis. See "The Awful German Language" (https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html) starting from "To continue with the German genders:"

This would be an interesting exploration of a sort of Sapir-Whorf type question.

Why is Sapir-Whorf so appealing? No one has been able to show more than a trivial effect on cognition from the language influences that that paper was promoting. Human thought is not rigidly channeled by vocabulary in the way that they described.

It's appealing because it seems to lots of people, though not everyone, that we think in words.

(I strongly disagree with Sapir-Whorf)

Years ago I had a conversation with my brother, when his son was a few months old. At some point I mentioned something along the lines of "he [the infant] thinks such-and-such", and he countered with "he doesn't think, he doesn't have any language".

It's unlikely that this statement was informed on any sort of linguistic basis, as he's not the kind of person who would read such things (he's more of the artsy type, not the "hacker" type), it was just intuitive to him. I think it is for many people, including me, but the human sense of "intuition" on these things is not always equally accurate.

This is kind of similar to how many people have an intuitive sense of dualism, that the mind and body are two separate things. This concept is highly unlikely, but for almost everyone – myself included – it's very natural, hence the gazillion stories about people swapping bodies and whatnot.

Appealing in what way? A "strong" Sapir-Whorf is rejected completely by mainstream linguists, to my knowledge.

Old English has the same gender system as German. The reason English doesn't have gendered nouns now isn't because we are so progressive, but because language tends to lose all its excess features as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English. Basically, people can't be bothered to do grammar properly so eventually it just goes away (see: “whom”).

Also, English is not the language of gender progressives. Many cultures had different conceptions of gender, including additional gender categories or even a total lack of concern for categorization. All of this was stamped out by English colonizers, who had extremely rigid ideas about gender (that they apparently still haven't gotten over in 2021 tbh).

English lost it’s gender and most of it’s verb declensions as a result of the Norse occupation. The Norse occupied around half of Britain for several hundreds of years. Both Norse and English had these linguistic forms, but the specifics did not match and were confusing to the adult Norse trying to learn English. They adopted a simplified version and that spread among the population.

The grammatical effect was stronger than the Norman influence because the Norse lived among the English unlike the Normans who were a ruling class.

The Norman influence was more in the vocabulary and spelling. Normans were the scribes, lawyers, etc. They introduced large numbers of Norman French words that trickled out into English. Their scribes used French spelling even when writing English words. That is part of why English spelling is so complex now.

I incorrectly assumed Norse and old English genders and cases ought to line up neatly and wouldn't have caused the whole system to be thrown out the window on contact. I stand corrected. Thanks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English#Decline_of_g...

The amount of common, everyday, practical vocabulary that descends from Old Norse that you use all the time on a daily basis is impressive.

> but because language tends to lose all its excess features as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English.

Citation needed - this sounds like pop linguistics without a scientific basis, to be honest.

English has plenty of “features”; what it lacks in morphology it makes up for in very complicated syntax. And it lost those morphological features well before the British colonial period, so it’s not really true that more people spoke it than, say, the Slavic languages which haven’t lost them.

Edited: I guessed wrong, see Tagbert's answer. It was Norse contact (erm, the ones in the north, not the Normans who were French-speaking ethnic Norse people in the south).

I thought it probably had more to do with the influence of Norman French. The Germanic gender and declension system couldn't survive the influx of French lexicon, as the two languages with completely incompatible grammar and genders coexisted and eventually merged into a new frankenlanguage.

There was a recent article I can't locate right now claiming that for some period of time, English scribes writing late middle English (?) used to add an extra 'e' (and maybe more endings) to various words following old grammatical rules that involve knowing the gender and case, but began to forget the rules and eventually it decayed into randomly adding 'e' to sound smart, which is the basis of modern joke forms like 'ye olde shoppe'.

As an English speaker it's interesting to compare with some of our closest cousins that have also lost a grammatical gender or two:

I don't know too much about Dutch, but as far as I can tell they went from the 3-gender German system to the 2-gender common/neuter system (like Scandinavia, yellow in the diagram) in the last few hundreds years, but their language is still full of frozen phases from the 3-gender system. I wonder, can a modern Dutch speaker actually create new phases using the words 'ten', 'ter' (= German zum, zur, "to the"), 'des', 'der' and maybe more? You'd have to know if a common gender noun was masculine or feminine, but I guess, unless you also know German, you won't be able to do it.

I believe the Afrikaans language of South Africa, a dialect of Dutch, is down to just one gender. IIUC they had to give up using Dutch school books some time in the past century, because (vast over simplification, I'm sure) they couldn't remember if nouns were common or neuter. I wonder if they also have frozen phrases that reflect the 2-gender, and perhaps even 3-gender grammar of the ancestral language.

The Scandinavians have a few pockets of dialects that still use 3 genders. I'm not sure how they maintain that, given that, as far as I know, the prestige forms and most literature are down to 2!

AFAIK the last people to speak a cousin language with more than one gender in the British Isles were the Norn speakers, who maintained a 3-gendered Norse dialect up until the mid 19th century.

I'm saying I think it might be the other way around. I'm thinking that maybe _because_ English lost it's gender system (due to the reasons you listed above) is why we see this "gender progressiveness" in our society. But I can only speak for the USA. I don't know if this same kind of gender progressiveness exists in other societies