Gender-neutral language in English
Steve Keating
In recent years it has become increasingly important to use gender-neutral language in most languages, and certainly this is the case with English. Grammatical and pronunciation errors can always be forgiven, but not using gender-neutral language is the quickest way to offend some listeners! Therefore, this is a worthwhile area to spend some time on.
The good news is that it is relatively simple to use gender-neutral language. One thing that confuses some learners of English is that English does not have nouns of a specific gender as many languages do. There are no masculine, feminine or neuter nouns. Therefore, using gender-neutral language is simpler than in many languages.
When speaking of a hypothetical person, let’s say a doctor, it may once have been acceptable to refer to this doctor using a masculine pronoun, as many doctors were male. However, this situation has changed, as there is now much more of a gender balance in the profession. Even without this gender balance, it would still be unacceptable in modern English to refer to a hypothetical doctor using a masculine pronoun.
Old way: A doctor should help his patients.
One new alternative: A doctor should help his or her (or her or his) patients. This sounds somewhat clunky.
A better alternative: Make everything plural: Doctors should help their parents. “Their” is a gender-neutral pronoun, so this is now an acceptable sentence.
There are some occasions when it may seem more difficult to use gender-neutral pronouns. For example, the words “each” and “every”, and their variations such as “everyone” and “everybody”, are always singular.
So you could say: Every doctor should help her or his patients. Again, it sounds clunky. A better way is to say: Every doctor should help their patients. You may argue that this is an ungrammatical mix of the singular “every” with the plural “their”. You would be right in saying that it appears ungrammatical. However, that is a perfectly acceptable sentence in modern English. It shows how the language evolves to meet societal changes.
Embrace the simplicity of gender-neutral language in English. If you would like to discuss further, or to perfect other aspects of your language studies, why not book a trial lesson with one of our teachers at nativespeakers.ch GmbH?
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