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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]
The use, in formal English, of he, him or his as a gender-neutral pronoun has traditionally been considered grammatically correct. [46] For example, William Safire in his "On Language" column in The New York Times approved of the use of generic he, mentioning the mnemonic phrase "the male embraces the female". [47]
He had three genders in Old English, but in Middle English, the neuter and feminine genders split off. Today, he is the only masculine pronoun in English. In the 18th century, it was suggested as a gender-neutral pronoun, and was thereafter often prescribed in manuals of style and school textbooks until the 1960s. [6]
This correlates with the geographical extent of the Viking Danelaw in the late 9th and early 10th centuries: for almost a century Norse constituted a prestige language with regard to the southern Northumbrian and east Mercian dialects of Old English. By the 11th century, the role of grammatical gender in Old English was beginning to decline: [4 ...
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-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids reference towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, [1] formation of phrases in a coequal manner, and discontinuing the collective use of male or female terms. [2]
Despite the recent criticism of gender-neutral language in the abortion rights movement, a poll of more than 10,000 Americans published by the Pew Research Center last month found that women ...
A set of four badges, created by the organizers of the XOXO art and technology festival in Portland, Oregon. Preferred gender pronouns (also called personal gender pronouns, often abbreviated as PGP [1]) are the set of pronouns (in English, third-person pronouns) that an individual wants others to use to reflect that person's own gender identity.