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4 Languages That Don't Give AF About the Gender Binary

4 Languages That Don't Give AF About the Gender Binary

4 Languages That Don't Give AF About the Gender Binary

A lot of us know gender is so beyond any binary, but English sometimes makes that pretty hard to accept. Here are 4 of many other languages that couldn't care less about male vs female.

jazjoyner

More so in the past few years, society has become more and more understanding of gender outside the antiquated binary understanding of male and female, with the mainstream slowly understanding nonbinary pronouns and identities. But not gonna lie, English, though technically "genderless," is so rooted in he versus she that sometimes it's hard to think outside the box.

Unlike English though, many other languages spoken around the world don't even use gendered pronouns, nor do they follow any sort of gender binary. These 4 are just a snapshot of those languages that help prove the gender binary is so not a thing.

Tagalog: Like a lot of other Austronesian languages, Tagalog (one of the official national languages of the Philippines) doesn’t subscribe to any gender pronouns. Because of the more recent Spanish influence, some suffixes do hold the well known -a (feminine) and -o (masculine) to describe things like families and occupations, but other than that, Tagalog tends to use other descriptors to describe individuals rather than gender.

Armenian: You can't actually discern between masculine or feminine in Armenian. However, it is understood that people can infer several different meaning of one word based on inflections alone. 

Yoruba: Instead of recognizing people by gender, Yoruba (a West African language used a lot in Nigeria) tends to focus more on categorizing people by age. There is no word for words like brother/sister, daughter or son for instance.

Persian (sometimes called Farsi): Persian is essentially a genderless language. Furthermore, males and females tend to hold the same pronouns and adjectives.

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Jaz Joyner

Jaz is a black non-binary writer and founder of QUNTFRONT residing in Brooklyn, NY. Their work has been featured in Huffington Post, Afropunk, The Establishment, Time Out New York and others.

Jaz is a black non-binary writer and founder of QUNTFRONT residing in Brooklyn, NY. Their work has been featured in Huffington Post, Afropunk, The Establishment, Time Out New York and others.