The Þog of 2024-08-11 — Gender & Language

I'm non-binary. I don't identify closely with either masculinity or femininity and I'm not a fan of being pushed into picking a side of a binary I'm have to pretend I'm a part of. I have an interest in languages and it saddens me seeing debates around the usage of various words in languages that have a grammatical gender system labeled with "male" and "female".

Unfortunately, even languages like Deutsch, Nederlands, and English that have grammatically "neuter" cases, which would initially be an obvious choice for gender neutral-language, many speakers feel like referring to people with them is dehumanising. In many languages, the "neuter" case is often an "inanimate" case, with "male" and "female" being two branches of an "animate" case. In most European languages, this system was inherited from an ancient parent language that was never written down but has been reconstructed in detail using the child languages that were written down.