There’s definitely some additional nuance (like a pronouns in bio/username situation) but this should cover the broad needs of anyone who is approaching this with good faith.
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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If only there were gender neutral pronouns in my language 😭
In arabic we don't even have neuter or non-gendered anythings, a table is a he or she.
Not even objects are safe 😔
In German it feels completely random.
A table is masculine. A castle is feminine. A sausage is feminine. A boy is masculine. A girl is neutral. A fire is neutral. ...
Not sure if there's any meaningful rule behind.
Actually, Mädchen (meaning "girl" in German) is a diminutive. It comes from Magd (an old word for "maid" or "young woman") with the -chen suffix, which is a common diminutive in German.
The -chen suffix makes words grammatically neuter, which is why Mädchen takes das instead of die, even though it refers to a female person.
I'm not German but the same applies to the Dutch word for girl, and we've the same rule for neutral. By the way, 'magd' in Dutch means virgin (maagd to be precise), which sounds incredibly inappropriate to be going around calling someone; little virgin (/¯ ಠ_ಠ)/¯
Sorry if you already know this, but it sounds from the wording of your post that you might not know that "maid" or "maiden" means virgin also.
No need to be sorry. I didn't realise, in Dutch I don't think that connotation stuck for the equivalent, meid. That simply means girl.
"my maiden aunt" means an aunt who never married (and it's presumed to be virginal because what other option is there /s)
So yeah
Some non binary people use the pronoun "they" in arabic, but unlike english it is exclusively meant for plural. And in arabic, verbs also are conjugated with amount, So you just can't say "They ate" in a singular form, you have to explicitly mark "ate" in plural.
It'd be like saying "they ate(plural verb)". It sounds very weird but there's not much better.
There's a similar — though very localised — thing in English with "themself."
The singular form is used, but it's far less common than the plural form "themselves." I often hear "themselves" used to refer to one non-binary person and it always sounds weird.
I guess we have to work with what we have. Is there an alternative in Arabic, like neopronouns?
Your comment made me try to think of one, and all I got was a headache.
In arabic everything is gendered. Even the most simple pronoun "I" changes the form of the sentence based on your gender (ie masculine: "ana ju'an" fem: "ana ju'ana"
Even the numbers and verbs are gendered. To try to add a new gender would be rethinking the entire language.
But in Arabic masculine pronouns are considered normal. Even with feminine objects like the sun, you can use a masculine pronoun "hua kabir" He (it) is big. So most enbies I know of just use masculine pronouns. There may be an alternative I don't know of. It's an interesting yet complex topic.
Isn't there a dual case (as in, specifically for two of something) in Arabic? Or is that primarily a formal thing?
There is. It's absolutely necessary, no exceptions at all. It's one of the only languages that really use it. It just adds to the complexity lol
As far as I know there isn't any rule to learn. Grammatical gender is a wild mixture of several things, sometimes it has something to do with the ending of words and sometimes with attributes of the things, if it has like agency, is an inanimate object, or is an abstract concept. Sometimes it's completely arbitrary and sometimes there are rules to it like with group of people. But there is no way of telling, you got to memorize it. In any way, grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological gender. And I'm pretty sure that's not it's origin. Though, we try to link it to biological gender in case of people. But even that has exceptions, and it doesn't really work with group of people etc.
Unlike for girl, das Mädchen, which is a diminutive (of die Maid, a virgin young woman) as it is ending with -chen and thus, is of neutral gender, I doubt if rules for the other examples do exist:
Oh sorry I went out and commented the same thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Doesn't matter, as you elaborated more deeply on why das Mädchen has neuter gender.
BTW: The use of (das) Fräulein (miss), again a diminutive; 'little woman', in German, to refer to an unmarried woman has come out of fashion since ~50 years and now may be perceived as insulting as well.
Mädchen is no longer perceived as a diminutive of Maid or Magd, as both terms are more used in a historic context, and thus, it stands on its own.
My only issue is when apparently someone can choose that "they", a gender neutral pronoun, doesn't apply to someone. I saw it in a recent Elliot Page post. Someone was getting ripped to shreds for talking about Elliot and saying "they". "No it's him! You're trying to minimize his identity!" was basically the response. But the person was talking about Elliots work pre and post transition and you could tell they were taking great care to not offend, and yet it was still offensive apparently. Which was then made even funnier when others chimed in to point out that Elliot specifically asks to be referred to as "They/Him".
My whole point is that some people need to cool it when it comes to gender neutral pronouns. Lest we forget, "I'm a dude, he's a dude, she's a dude, we're all dudes!"