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Encyclopedia > Non sexist language

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page.


Gender-neutral language (gender-generic, gender-inclusive, non-sexist, or sex-neutral language) is language that attempts to refer neither to males nor females when discussing an abstract or hypothetical person whose sex cannot otherwise be determined, as opposed to more traditional language forms, which may use male or female pronouns in such a context. In Indo European and Afro-Asiatic languages, male pronouns have commonly been used when referring to both genders or to a person or people of an unknown gender. The goal of this language modification is to make the language as inoffensive as possible, similar to the idea of political correctness.

Contents

Examples

One might state, "Tomorrow I will meet my new doctor; I hope he is friendly."; however, unless one is certain that the new doctor is a man, advocates of non-sexist language generally argue that it would be better to state, "Tomorrow I will meet Dr. Smith, who I hope is friendly." (Critics would point out that this example is rather contrived, since non-defining relative clauses are extremely rare in everyday speech. The person in this example would be talking like a book.)


A business might advertise that it is looking for a new chair or chairperson, rather than a new chairman, thereby implying that only a man would be acceptable for this position. Some advocates of non-sexist language would see it as unobjectionable to refer to a man in such a position as a chairman, provided that a woman would be referred to by the equivalent term chairwoman. Others would claim, however, that the sex of the occupant of the chair is irrelevant and thus chairperson or chair are the only acceptable terms.


Likewise, if a woman states that she is dating someone; a system of non-sexist language might deem it inappropriate to ask her, "Who is he?"; rather, one should ask, "Whom are you dating?" to allow for the possibility that she might be dating a woman. Such language is an attempt to avoid heterosexism.


Common positions

Views among advocates of non-sexist language are spread over a wide range, from passionate argumentation in favour, to consistent use in their own speech and writing, to occasional use. However, most people simply decide for themselves whether or not to use it in their writing.


A great many people have no opinion on non-sexist language and make no special effort to avoid what advocates may describe as sexist language. However, many terms advocated or proposed by advocates of non-sexist language, such as Ms., firefighter, or he or she, have entered the common lexicon (in some cases, before advocacy of non-sexist language began), and may be used by those who do not have any particular feeling about the subject.


Still others regard non-sexist language as revisionist, as promoting poor or heavy writing, excessively "politically correct," or simply a cosmetic change that does nothing to actually repel sexism. They may consciously refuse to use forms of speech advocated by promoters of non-sexist language. See below.


History

Many of the modern masculine terms in Modern English in use today originated as gender neutral terms in Old English. For example, the word 'man' was originally gender neutral and qualified to specify male or female. While the male qualification died out, the female wíf (which produced woman) survived, leaving 'man' with both its original gender-neutral meaning (people), especially in compounds such as "mankind", and its gender-specific meaning, male.


Both Ancient Greek and Classical Latin show a similar process for anthropos and homo respectively. Both of these words mean "man in general" or "human being"; as in the modern "anthropology" or "homo sapiens. For "male human as opposed to female human", there exist the separate words aner and vir, from which we get "virile". Most modern descendants of the Latin homo such as French homme, Italian uomo, Spanish hombre are specifically male, while Romanian om has retained its original meaning as any human person.


It should be noted that the Latin root of "human" is not homo, but humus, earth, which carries a feminine grammatical gender.


Awareness of the social effects of language was largely a 20th century phenomenon in the English-speaking world, and has been linked to the development of the principle of linguistic relativity by Benjamin Whorf and others. However, a program to rid Norwegian of sexist presuppositions dates from the mid 19th century and remains an ongoing part of Norwegian culture.


Add later history here


Disputed issues

There are a wide range of disputed issues in the debate over 'non-sexist language'. Are there inherently sexist language forms, and if so, what are they? If they exist, should they be changed? If they should be changed, how should this be achieved?


Are some uses of language inherently sexist?

Advocates of 'non-sexist language', including many feminists, argue that traditional language fails to reflect the presence of women in society adequately. In general, they complain about a number of issues:

  • Over-use of what they consider to be exclusively gender-specific pronouns like "he".
  • Use of "man" to refer to all people.
  • Over-use of gender-specific job titles.
  • Use of Miss and Mrs. (see Ms.).
  • non-parallel usage, such as "man and wife".
  • Stereotypical words such as virile and ladylike

Advocates of 'non-sexist language' see various problems with these uses:

  • They marginalize women and create the impression of a male-dominated society.
  • They can be patronising, for example treating women only as marriage material
  • They can perpetuate stereotypes about the "correct" way for a man or woman to behave.

Opponents of non-sexist language do not accept these arguments as valid.

  • Some regard the whole thing as "political correctness gone mad".
  • Some people believe that while these usages may, on the surface, appear gender-biased, in practice most people think of them and use them as gender-neutral.
  • Some people disagree with feminism and argue that men and women differ enough that these differences are rightly embedded in the language. In this context, see masculism.

A deeper variant of these arguments involves the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the suggestion that our language shapes our thought processes and that in order to eliminate sexism we would do well to eliminate "sexist" forms from our language. Some people dismiss the effectiveness of such a suggestion, viewing 'non-sexist language' as irrelevant window-dressing which merely hides sexist attitudes rather than changing them.


Enforcement, persuasion, or evolution?

A tiny minority of advocates for non-sexist language argue that these "sexist" usages should be banned. It is unclear how this would be achieved. Hate speech legislation does exist in some countries, but applies to much more clear-cut and widely accepted cases of perceived prejudice. Many editing houses, corporations, and government bodies have official policies in favour of in-house use of non-sexist language. In some cases, laws exist regarding the use of non-sexist language in certain situations, such as job advertisements.


The majority of advocates for 'non-sexist language' wish to proceed by persuasion rather than enforcement. One tool of this persuasion is creating guidelines (see below) that indicate how they believe language should be used. Another tool is simply to make use of 'non-sexist language' oneself, and lead by example.


In addition to those who oppose any change, some opponents of 'non-sexist language' argue that a change in language should evolve organically from changing public attitudes towards gender issues, rather than be achieved either by enforcement, or by persuasion.


Neologising

While some terms, such as firefighter and singular they, are sometimes denigrated by opponents as neologisms, they in fact have a long history that predates the beginning of the women's liberation movement. At other times new terms have indeed been created, such as Womyn. The issue is confused by satirists who invent extreme examples of the supposed consequences of 'non-sexist language', such as epersoncipation.


Some critics accuse advocates of non-sexist language of "re-gendering" language, replacing masculine in some cases by feminine terms that are equally sexist. Other critics argue that some phrases used in non-sexist language violate the rules of proper grammar and style.


Some critics claim that words like "he or she" are not real English words, for they only exist in print, not in speech. In print it is easy for an editor to employ rules of non-sexist language, but speech is practically impossible to control. People simply don't use words like "he or she" in their everyday speech; instead they use "they" or "he". Only the most determined reformer would actually use "he or she" in a casual conversation, since it would sound stilted and affected to many people.


Many linguists see words like he or she as a solution to a non-existent problem. Most English speakers happily use the singular they without thinking twice, but reformers still insist that it is a grammatical error. Nonetheless, the case for the singular they is quite compelling from a linguistic point of view. It has been in continuous use since the Middle Ages, and it was even used by the greatest English authors including Shakespeare and Chaucer. In light of this, many newer style guides are beginning to accept the singular they as grammatically correct.


Guidelines

Many different authorities have presented guidelines on whether, and if so and where, to use 'non-sexist language'. Wikipedia is not a style guide, so we present a selection of such sources here.

  • ...

Many dictionaries, stylebooks, and some authoritative guides now counsel the writer to follow the new guidelines.


These guidelines, though accepted by many, remain in some contexts controversial, and are applied to differing degrees among English speakers worldwide. often reflecting different cultures and language structure, for example American English in contrast to British English. They are also impacted upon, depending on whether a person uses English as their first language or as a second language, regional variants or whether their form of English is based on grammatical structures inherited from a no longer widely used other language (for example, Hiberno-English) or owes its linguistic structure to earlier Old English or Elizabethan English. In these cases, language structure from their native tongue or linguistic inheritance may enter into their terminology.


Non-sexist language in other languages

The situation of 'non-sexist' usage is very different in languages that have masculine and feminine grammatical gender, such as French, German, and Spanish, simply because it is impossible to construct a gender-neutral sentence the way it can be done in English. For example, in French, the masculine gender supersedes the feminine; la femme et l'homme (the woman and the man) has the pronoun ils (they-masculine).


Accordingly, most of the focus has been on more concrete problems such as job titles. Due to the presence of grammatical gender, the strategy is the exact opposite of that of English: creating feminine job titles rather than eliminating them. This is based on the idea that it is insulting to call a woman (for example) le médecin (the (masculine) doctor), as if she changed sex or became somehow more mannish when she went to work.


Basque

Basque language is remarkably gender-free. Most nouns have no gender or there are different words for males and females (ama, "mother", aita, "father"). Some words take suffixes according to gender (aktore, "actor"; aktoresa, "actress"), but they are rare, and both purists who avoid Romance influence and the Basque Institute of the Woman recommend against it. While there are no gender pronouns, verbs can mark gender in the singular second person (this provides no information since the listener already knows their gender): hik duk, "you (male) have it"; hik dun, "you (female) have it". Non-sexism supporters propose substituting those forms by the more formal ones: zuk duzu "you have it". In earlier stages, the relation between hik and zuk was like that of you and thou in old English. Some Basque dialects already avoid hik as too disrespectful.


It should be noted that the use of a gender-free language has not made the historical Basque society a non-sexist one.


Chinese

It is interesting that despite a history of male dominance comparable to or exceeding the level of most other cultures, the Chinese language escapes many of the gender-neutral problems affecting other languages due to its underlying structure. First of all, comprehension in Chinese is wholly dependent on word order; as Chinese is virtually a monosyllabic language, no inflexion, pre- or suffixes of any kind are possible. Devoid of such inflection, all Chinese words are thus inherently gender-neutral. For example, the word for 'doctor' is "yi sheng" (醫生) and can only be made gender-specfic by adding the word for "male" or "female" in front of it. Thus to specify a male doctor, one would need to say "nán yi sheng" (男醫生). This particular construction would admittedly be rarely due to the stereotypical perception in Chinese society that doctors tend to be male, but that is not a feature of the language itself. Under normal circumstances both male and female doctors would be simply referred to as "yi sheng".


In stark contrast to the large tables of pronouns in many European languages, Chinese has really only one third-person pronoun in spoken form, "ta" (他) for all situations. "Ta" can mean he, she, or it in any case or tense (neither concept actually exist in Chinese). However, in written language there is a distinction between the three, and the female-only form of the pronoun "ta", written (她) with the radical for 'female', but pronounced the same as the neutral "ta" in speech. Despite this, there is no "he/she" problem in Chinese, because pronouns are generally superfluous in the types of constructions in which the matter comes up in English. The pronoun is implied from context.


Esperanto

Esperanto is accused of being inherently sexist, because the generic form of nouns is the same as the male form and different from the female form. E.g., doktoro = "doctor (male or unspecified sex)", doktorino = "female doctor"; also doktoroj = "doctors (male, mixed male/female, or unspecified sex)", doktorinoj = "female doctors". Some words, like patro ("father"), are intrinsecally masculine, and there is no single word to express "a parent". (This use of -in to form the feminine of nouns is reminiscent of German, e.g. Maler, Malerin = "painter".) Likewise for pronouns: as in English, li ("he") may be generic, whereas ŝi ("she") is always female. Esperanto has a prefix ge- meaning "both sexes": gedoktoroj ("male and female doctors"). The use of ge- to remove gender from a intrinsecally gendered word (as in using *gepatro ("a parent") instead of patro au patrino, ("father or mother") is not accepted by everybody.


To some critics, this aspect of the language makes the implication that masculinity is some kind of default, and femininity is an exception. The feature is particularly irksome to English speakers, since the corresponding suffix -ess is much less used in that language.


Defenders reply that this asymmetric treatment of male and female is not a feature of Esperanto, but only a general feature of most European languages. In each Romance language, for instance, grammatical genders are assigned to all nouns — even to unsexed objects, or in opposition the biological sex (as autorité = "authority" in French, guardia = "policeman" in Italian, and virilidad = "masculinity" in Spanish, which all have feminine gender). In fact, given the arbitrary assignment of grammatical gender, Romance and German speakers generally do not make the sexist assumptions claimed by the critics. Viewed in this broader context, argue the Esperantists, "sexist language" is shown to be a matter of cultural assumptions and interpretations by the speakers, not of the language per se.


Moreover, since Esperanto does not inflect adjectives for gender (as most of those languages do) it is in fact an "unsexed" (technically, gender-less) language. Indeed, it has become acceptable in Esperanto to use doktoro even to refer to a female doctor, a custom that is compatible with the standard grammar. Thus doktorino only needs to be used to emphasize femaleness; and some have even proposed the use of virdoktoro (literally "male-doctor") when one wants to emphasize maleness. As for the pronouns ŝi and li, one can use the neutral tiu ("that one") instead. The alternative ŝ/li is also used, but it has the same problems as "s/he" in English, though it is easier pronounceable. Some users also use neologisms such as ri as a gender-neutral pronoun.


Ido, a constructed languaged that is heavily based on Esperanto but seeks to avoid its perceived shortfalls, does not have this asymmetric gender-marking system. Instead, nouns in Ido for kinds of people are gender-neutral in their ordinary form, but may be made either female- or male-specific using a suffix. Examples: sekretario, secretary --- sekretariulo, man secretary --- sekretariino, woman secretary; doktoro, doctor --- doktorulo, man doctor --- doktorino, woman doctor.

Finnish

Finnish has only gender-neutral pronouns (it totally lacks grammatical gender). The word "hän" is completely gender-neutral and means both "she" and "he". Suffix "-tar" or "-tär" can be added to some words (mostly professions) to "feminize" the word, for example näyttelijä (actor) - näyttelijätär (actress), but this is fairly uncommon. Also you can always use the basic word for both genders (näyttelijä for male and female actors).


It has been argued that Finland has been a pioneer in women right issues because it has no gender-specific pronouns: for example, it was the first European country to give women the right to vote. However, international studies show that Finns are not any more unprejudiced than users of any other language.


French

See also the French version of this article (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langage_sexiste)


In French, feminine job titles are created by adding -e (l'avocate), -eure (la docteure), -euse (la travailleuse), -esse (la mairesse),, -ice {la directrice), or nothing in some cases such as -iste or -logue (la psychologue). More generally, "non-sexist" styles can include the use of brackets or capital letters to insert feminine endings (étudiant(e)s or étudiantEs) or repeat gendered words (toutes et tous, citoyennes et citoyens).


Words that formerly referred to a dignitary's wife (l'ambassadrice) can be used to refer to a woman in that position; this, like other "non-sexist" forms, is much more common in Quebec than in France. Although the marriage titles have mainly dropped out of use, many cite the possible confusion as a reason for continuing to use such as Madame le Président or Madame l'ambassadeur. For this reason, these remain the most frequent, at least in France. (On the other hand, an ambassador's husband would not be Monsieur l'ambassadrice.)


German

In German, creating a feminine job title is usually done by adding -in to the word in question. For example, the general term for computer scientist is Informatiker. The male form is unchanged: Informatiker. The female form, however, is distinguished by adding -in, giving Informatikerin.


Job descriptions in job adverts are usually formulated addressing both sexes (Informatiker oder Informatikerin). The use of slashes is commonplace, too, such as in Informatiker/in. Sometimes a form of contraction with capitalization inside the word is used ("InformatikerIn"). In some circles this is especially used to formulate (written) openings, such as Liebe KollegInnen (Dear colleagues). One problem is, that you cannot hear this non-sexist phrases (sound: InformatikerIn == Informatikerin), it sounds like the female form, which is unusual for neutral expressions. By some people the capitalized I is considered as a corruption of the language.


German has three third person nominative singular pronouns: er (male), sie (female), and man (either). Man is frequently used in general statements, e.g. Man kann nicht hier parken - "One cannot park here." This pronoun man is distinguished from the noun Mann (capitalized and with two n's), which means "male adult human".


German has distinguished forms of pronouns for her and him. The use of pronouns is non-discriminatory since it distinguishes both sexes in a consistent manner rather than marking only the feminine as is done with job titles.


The traditional phraseology of the language reflects a domination of the male over the female, as in many other languages. There are fixed phrases where the male form comes first, such as man and woman (Mann und Frau). The use of Fräulein to address young women is very uncommon these days, but it lacks a male counterpart.


External link

The Swiss weekly newspaper WOZ - Die Wochenzeitung (http://www.woz.ch) edits all published articles to non-sexist language.


Hebrew

In Hebrew, which has a high degree of grammatical gender, virtually every noun (as well as pronoun of second and third degree) is attributed as either masculine or feminine. Therefore, there are laws constituted in Israel that require job ads to be written in a non-sexist form, often with a separator '/' (e.g. "dru'shim/ot", "maz'kir/a") to explicitly proclaim that the job is offered for both males and females equally.


Hungarian

Hungarian does not have gender-specific pronouns and lacks grammatical gender: referring to a gender needs explicit statement of "the man" (he) or "the woman" (she). "Ő" means "he/she" and "ők" means "they". Hungarian distinguishes persons and things, as you refer to things as "az" (it) or "azok" (those).


Italian

In Italian feminine job titles are easily formed (-a, -essa and other suffixes) but often they are perceived as ridiculous neologisms. Italian job announcements often use a specific expected gender ("segretaria", "meccanico") or they address both sexes with a slash ("candidato/a"). Many adjectives have identical feminine and masculine forms, so they are effectively gender-neutral when used without articles as job titles ("dirigente", "responsabile di ...") and in many other contexts; slashes are often applied to articles ("il/la cliente", the customer). There are full sets of masculine and feminine pronouns and articles (with some coincidences) and some vestiges of neuter; adjectives are declined, even if many remain the same, and adjective declination is also used in the many verbal tenses involving the past participle. The masculine gender is the default for isolated adjectives and pronouns, for mixed-gender aggregates and for generic usage.


Japanese

Japanese has gender specific pronouns, but not grammatical gender. Thus, isha can mean one or many male doctors, one or many female doctors, or many male and female doctors. Pronouns are generally avoided unless the meaning is unclear. On the other hand, when referring to "them" the male plural pronoun (they [masculine]) karera is usually used in preference to the rather awkward sounding kanojo-tachi (they [feminine]). This can be avoided by using the gender neutral, grammatical and natural-sounding "those people" (ano hito-tachi).


Korean

Korean, like a few other East Asian languages such as Japanese, does not use pronouns in everyday language, because the meaning is clear in the context. In case of confusion, there are pronouns to clarify the position, but normally the actual subject (person) is used rather than the pronoun. As for job titles, these are not gender-specific. Again, the meaning is normally clear in the context.


Spanish

In Spanish, it is usually quite easy to change an -o to an -a, or to add an -a to an ending such as -or (el doctor, la doctora). Other endings can be left alone or changed (la estudiante but la alcaldesa). -ista is left alone. (One problem is el policía, "police officer", since la policía means "the police force". The only useful feminine term is la mujer policía). Traditionally, a presidenta was the president's wife, but in modern usage it means mainly a female president. A fashion current in writing in Spain is to use the at sign (@ or the anarchist circled A to replace -o or -a, especially in political writing (¡Ciudadan@s!), but it is more common to use the slash (/) as in (el/la candidato/a). These usages beg the question of how to pronounce them.


(See also Alternative political spellings).


As in French, some politicians seek to avoid percieved sexism in their speeches, so they may repeat the gendered words ("ciudadanos y ciudadanas"). This way of speaking is subject to parodies where new words with the opposite ending are created for the sole purpose of contrasting with the gendered word traditionally used for the common case (like *especialistos and *felizas in "los y las especialistos y especialistas felices y felizas").


Spanish nouns and adjectives have grammatical gender and the endings do not always have something to do with the sex of the person.


Words ending in -o may refer to either a man or a woman: testigo


Words ending in -a may refer to either a man or a woman as well: dentista, ciclista, especialista.


Some words ending in -a refer only to men: cura (that is, priest, a word which always ends in -a for a profession so far held only by men)


Most nouns have an ending for the feminine and another for the masculine: cirujano, cirujana; escribano, escribana; maestro, maestra


There are gender inclusive words in Spanish. They often come from the Latin agent participle -ens: representante, comerciante, estudiante. However clienta is a female cliente.


Gender changes meaning

Activists against percieved sexism in language are also concerned about words where the feminine form has a different (usually less prestigious meaning):


An offensive example is hombre público ("public man", a politician) and mujer pública ("public woman", a whore).


Presidenta used to be "the president's wife", but there have been several women presidents in Latin American republics. Some feel that the word presidente has a common gender ending: -e, but others have extended the meaning of the feminine form.


Modisto ("fashion designer") was created to difference from modista ("a female clothes maker").


An undecided case is "secretary". A secretaria is usually an attendant for her boss or a female typist. With the access of women to positions labelled as "secretary general" or similar, some have chosen to use the masculine gendered la secretario and others have to clarify that secretaria is a decision position, not a subordinate one.


Another is juez ("judge"). Many new judges in Spain are women. Since the ending of juez is uncommon in Spanish, some prefer being called la juez while others have created the neologism jueza.


Tamil

Tamil has a gender-neutral form for the third-person plural, which is also used for the third-person singular in all formal communication. Most job titles are derived from this form as they are mostly used in a formal context. They are thus gender-free.


Turkish

Turkish is a gender neutral language, as most other Turkic languages. Nouns are in generic form and for both males and females and this generic form is used. For example: Doktor (doctor), eczacı (pharmacist), mühendis (engineer) etc.


The Turkish equivalent for he, she and it is O. For example:

  • O, gece yürümeyi çok seviyor. (He/she/it likes walking at night)
  • Onu çok seviyorum. (I love him/her/it so much)

There are a few exceptions, where it is mandatory to provide gender (because of the nature of the foreign word origins):

  • İş + Adam + ı = İşadamı (Business + Man = Businessman)
  • İş + Kadın + ı = İşadamı (Business + Woman = Businesswoman)

There are very minor exceptions, which are constructed from native Turkish words after 1900s:

  • Bilim + Adam + ı = Bilimadamı (Science + Man = Scientist)
  • Bilim + Kadın + ı = Bilimadamı (Science + Woman = Scientist)

Russian

Though Russian intrinsically shares many of the same problems concerning gender-neutral words with English and other languages -- for instance, usage of male-specific words for some occupations -- this has not been viewed as a problem, even in the recent years. Almost all women, even those who consider themselves feminists, do not object to what could be perceived as gender-specific language. Constructs like "he or she", though grammatically correct, are unheard of, and changing the occupation name into a gender-neutral form is virtually impossible (some occupations have the same word for either male or female form, while those that do not (i.e., male секретарь vs. female секретарша secretary) also do not have a grammatically correct gender-neutral form, apart from an awkard construct such as "тот, кто выполняет секретарскую работу" / "the one who is engaged in secretary work").


Russian does have intrinsically gender-neutral words; when these exist, they are always used in place of gender-specific ones (for example, человек / human as opposed to мужчина / man and женщина / woman). Otherwise, a male form is used as an equivalent for gender-neutral form with no practical problems.


Serbian

Like the most other Slavic languages, Serbian has more gender problems then English. Serbian language has different forms for masculine and feminine past tense: он је радио (he was working), она је радила (she was working). Just rare aorist (in Serbian language aorist is tense, not aspect) doesn't make difference between genders. Also, all nouns in Serbian language have grammatical gender: masculine, feminine or neuter. (Almost) all nouns which end with consonant are masculine, (almost) all which end with 'a' are feminine and almost all which end with 'o' and 'e' are neutre (of course, there are some exceptions...). Adjectives and verb aspects (but, not all tenses) determine gender, too.


There are problems with noun gender, too. Some masculine noun means occupation and corresponding feminine nouns means things: говорник means speaker and it is masculine but feminine word говорница means speaker's platform (as well as female speaker); тренер means coach and it is masculine but feminine word тренерка means warm-up suit (as well as female coach).


In the spirit of Serbian language it is usual to determinate gender: учитељица for female teacher (учитељ is male teacher) and професорка for female professor (професор is male professor). But, patriarchal culture from Middle ages up to the first part of 20th century brought a lot of sexist language: министар was (male) minister, but министарка was not female minister, but wife of minister, професорка was not female professor, but wife of professor, etc. Patriarchal influence is not so hard today as it was until the second part of 20th century. However, there are a lot of linguists (even females) which argues that "female names for occupations are not natural for Serbian language", which is not true: child will not call her/his female tutor "Васпитачу!" ("(Male) tutor!"), but "Васпитачице!" ("(Female) tutor!) etc.


It is hard to find a way for talking without specification of gender in Serbian, but is is possible to make some balance: you can talk about some person as "човек" ("human", but with strong "male semantics" as well as with masculine gender), "особа" ("person", with feminine gender) or "људско биће" ("human being", with neuter gender).


Only plural forms have clear general meaning: "професори" means both -- male professors as well as female and male professors, but "професорке" means only female professors. However, feminists like to speak "професори и професорке" (male professors and female professors or vice versa) and to write "професори/ке".


See also

External links


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