#and it probably also applies to ireland even tho i’d consider them more colonized rather than colonizer

[gayagendaofficial]

i think something interesting that might lead to why so many english speakers think that gender distinctions are an inherent part of pronouns is just the fact that so many of the most common languages to learn as a second language for english speakers happen to share this feature

there’s the obvious example of the indo-european languages, a family which english falls into. (late) proto-indo-european likely had a masculine-feminine-neuter gender system, and this is reflected in most modern indo-european languages, even if only in the pronouns (like English he/she/it, or Swedish which has han for “he” and hon for “she” despite the fact that the feminine and masculine genders merged into a common gender for regular nouns). this family includes the romance languages, germanic languages, and slavic languages, all of which contain at least one popular second language for english speakers, if not multiple. interestingly, two major indo-european languages from outside of europe, farsi and hindi/urdu, don’t have gendered pronouns. farsi has lost gender entirely (though it’s probably less common as a second language for english speakers), and hindi/urdu, which does distinguish between masculine and feminine in most nouns, does not make the distinction in the personal pronouns (technically hindi/urdu doesn’t have third person personal pronouns at all, and uses demonstrative pronouns in their place)

the semitic languages also have grammatical gender, generally in a masculine-feminine system, which also affects their pronouns. this includes both arabic and hebrew, which are fairly common as second languages for english speakers. in fact, for both of these languages, pronouns are not only distinguished by gender in the third person, but also in the second person. for example, in arabic you have anta (you, singular masculine) and anti (you, singular feminine)

finally, i wanna talk about a japanese and chinese (which are not related at all), both of which are common second languages. Japanese doesn’t have grammatical gender, but it does have gendered pronouns. 彼 (kare) translates as “he” and 彼女 (kanojo) translates as “she”. japanese also has some gender distinctions in second and first person pronouns as well. i don’t know why japanese does this, since it doesn’t have grammatical gender and i don’t know of it having had grammatical gender historically, but there are some words that are generally considered to be “more masculine” or “more feminine”, even if they don’t necessarily have grammatical gender. chinese is an extremely interesting example here, because there is no distinction between masculine and feminine in spoken mandarin, but there is in the written form. tā is the pronunciation of the third person singular pronoun regardless of gender, but it is written as 他 for “he” and 她 for “she”. this is actually specifically because of western influence and not because chinese already had any sort of gender distinction in pronouns. this may give the impression to english-speaking learners of mandarin that even if you don’t make a gender distinction in speech, there “needs” to be a gender distinction at least in writing (of course this idea breaks down when you remember that illiterate people exist and language predates writing, but i digress).

so yeah, a native English speaker could speak multiple second languages, but if those languages happen to be Spanish, Arabic, and Japanese (all common as second languages), they’d still only have experienced pronouns that are gendered. grammatical gender and gendered pronouns might not be the most common cross-linguistically, but the languages where they do appear happen to have huge numbers of speakers. it’s like how the sound [θ] (the “th” sound in “think” in general american english) is hard to make and rare cross- linguistically, and yet there are hundreds of millions of people who can pronounce it worldwide since it occurs in both english and arabic, two of the most widely spoken languages.

there’s this post going around that’s like ‘what if alien languages had pronouns that didn’t include gender information!’ and there’s about five different enthusiastic replies and like, i get the excitement but i’m begging you to learn about languages other than english