Is everyone male?
I thought the Guardian was talking about specialty pronouns in German but it turns out to be more interesting than that.
Berlin’s recently appointed conservative mayor has said he will refuse to use gender-neutral language in office, insisting he wanted to use a language “that everyone understands”.
Surprise twist.
This is arguably more complicated than it would be in English because the German language genders words into male, female, and neutral.
Not “words”; the reporter means “nouns.” Nouns have genders in all the European languages I know anything about, while English doesn’t. That fact does indeed make things more complicated.
According to traditional language rules, a male citizen is a Bürger, a female a Bürgerin. But when male and female citizens are referred to collectively or plurally, the generic masculine automatically applies and they are termed Bürger.
In French (and perhaps all the rest of the languages) you can’t ever use the female plural “elles” if there is even just one “il” in the crowd. A billion “elles” and one “il” – “ils” it is. (At least that’s the “rule.” I suspect it’s not obeyed quite that rigorously.)
So yes, I think a move to gender-neutral language of that kind would be a good thing. English too please.
Basque doesn’t have genders. Nor does Turkish, nor the Finnish-Ugric languages. As for Indo-European languages (in addition to English), Bengali, Persian, and Armenian lack gender.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but apparently some Spaniards have taken to using the feminine form (e.g., nosotras) when referring to groups of people in which the majority are women.
Some Hebrew speakers, too.
German adjectives agree with the noun in gender or number, so have gender as well.
Bürger is identical to the masculine singular, but that is not a grammatical rule the way it is in French. Other nouns add letters to form the plural, which is neutral. I doubt most German-speakers give much thought to that ending, although the rule is no letters added for masculine nouns that end with -en, -el, or -er. Also for neutral nouns that end with -chen, including mädchen (girl), a weird word to be neuter. Given that ‘Die’ is the feminine definite article or the plural article, I don’t think it operates mentally quite the same way Romance languages do.
Slightly off topic, but the Finnish-Ugrics (Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian + some tiny languages) are gender neutral in nouns and also pronouns. I bet it’s hell for luxury pronoun users.
The issue is actually a bit more complicated than that:
There has been a trend for at least 20-30 years to avoid just using the “generic masculinum” in German to make women more visible in language. There is a sound scientific basis for this as several experiments have shown that people will not understand the generic masculinum as actually generic and will by default visualize a male person. This is of course especially problematic for kids because they will tend to see doctors, scientists, politicians etc. as male per default simply due to the language. (There are also studies which show that when you say something like “social worker”, in languages which do not gender nouns people will tend to associate a person of the sex that is stereotypically connected with this occupation, but in languages like German, people will always associate a male person if you use the generic masculinum.)
That has been the situation until perhaps 5 or 10 years ago with more and more official language using formulations like “Bürgerinnen und Bürger”. There has been some resistance to that but the tendency was clear in the direction of more and more people using this, although it makes texts sometimes difficult to read (because of the gendered nature of articles and pronouns, so you would have phrases like “der Bürger oder die Bürgerin muss seine oder ihre…” (the citizen or citizenness must … his or her…).
Then the moment came where this was not deemed sufficient because – you guessed it – this excludes non-binary people and other special snowflakes. Because of that, media have started to use weird ways of writing like Bürger*innen or Bürger:Innen where the asterisk or colon is supposed to represent all those non-binary people.
This “new” way of “gendering language” has been more widely opposed in my perception at least (Our German right-wing party AfD, which is becoming rather strong at the moment, has latched onto this. ), and it seems that the backlash is that now people go back all the way to the generic masculinum despite all the evidence that it does lead to mental underrepresentation of women.
Sonderval,
That is interesting – some parallels but also differences to French, at least here in Quebec. I would say there is a similar dynamic now around the usage of ils/elles, perhaps 20 years ago it was becoming more common to hear both used in a similar way to what you describe in German. That seems to have reverted to either ils, or adding the neologism ‘iels’ ( ‘ielles’) – which is much much rarer.
I guess the endpoint is about the same, less inclusion is the result. With French it really is reversion to the masculine default, whereas in German it is just a matter of the expectations operating.
It always struck me that “Mädchen” (girl) is neuter in German. As if a girl had no sex until she became old enough (or married enough, in past days) to become eine Frau. But of course that’s just a language construct, without relation to reality, because diminutives are grammatically neuter. Still, I recall some of my more unwashed and self-proclaimed progressive friends saying “die Mädchen” in the past, as if the grammar annoyed them and they were determined to try to bring the word in line with biology.