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Gender-neutral language is language that avoids assumptions about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing. In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, English does not retain grammatical gender and most of its nouns, adjectives and pronouns are therefore not gender-specific.
Gender is no longer an inflectional category in Modern English. [9] Traces of the Old English gender system are found in the system of pronouns. Nonetheless, Modern English assumes a "natural" interpretation of gender affiliation, [10] which is based on the sex, or perceived sexual characteristics, of the pronoun's referent.
The principle of male as norm holds that grammatical and lexical devices such as the use of the suffix-ess (as in actress) specifically indicating the female form, the use of man to mean "human", and similar means strengthen the perceptions that the male category is the norm, and that corresponding female categories are derivations and thus less important.
This system of gender is quite minimal compared to languages with grammatical gender. [10] Historically, "he" referred to a generic person whose gender is unspecified in formal language, but the gender-neutral singular they has long [11] [12] [13] been common in informal language, and is becoming increasingly so in formal language. [14]
Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional ...
The gender of an English pronoun typically coincides with the natural gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent. The choice between she , he , they , and it comes down to whether the pronoun is intended to designate a woman, a man, or someone or something else.
Languages with grammatical gender, such as French, German, Greek, and Spanish, present unique challenges when it comes to creating gender-neutral language.Unlike genderless languages like English, constructing a gender-neutral sentence can be difficult or impossible in these languages due to the use of gendered nouns and pronouns.
The difference model has roots in the studies of John Gumperz, who examined differences in cross-cultural communication.While the difference model deals with cross-gender communication, the male and female genders are often presented as being two separate cultures, hence the relevance of Gumperz's studies.