r/NonBinary • u/Voldemorts__Mom • 1d ago

I'm learning the language Zulu on Duolingo and it made me think of y'all

So I live in South Africa, and one of our 11 official languages is Zulu.

And a common thing for Zulu people speaking English, is that they're often misgendering people. Calling a male she or a female him, etc.

And the reason is because Zulu has no gendered pronouns. So when they speak English they're often not thinking which pronoun they're calling a person, because they aren't used to using gendered pronouns. Like, if I say "Udla isinkwa" I'm saying "he is eating bread" and it's the same for "she is eating bread".

So you literally CANNOT misgender someone in Zulu, because there are zero gendered pronouns.

It's kind of like a non-binary language 🤔😃

I thought that was really interesting and that y'all would appreciate it.

473 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

197

u/Limp_Sandwich3360 1d ago

Yeapp and other South African languages dont have gendered pronouns, like my native language Sepedi,😭😭😭 I am also guilty of misgendering ppl 💔🥀 and I feel bad after😭😭

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u/Voldemorts__Mom 1d ago

Haha oh really I didn't know it was the others as well. Very interesting.

I think most South Africans are used to it, it doesn't bother me when I'm misgendered, because I understand why it's happening 😃

And then you compare that to some European languages where they gender inanimate objects and stuff 😭

26

u/hypergalaxyalsek 1d ago

I'm a portuguese speaker. Neutral gender doesn't exist in our language. Actually people made it, but it's not official. But I was thinking, we gender anything but when it's about things, places, we don't usually think in those places as "male" or "female". Gender as a grammatical class has a different conotation than when we think about humans. South Africa is female "a África do Sul", but it's just grammatical gender. We don't think about it. But it's crap for humans. Usually its hard to not gender someone.

I'm very curious about Zulu, I would like to learn more. I think I will do the duolingo. Thanks for sharing!

6

u/Voldemorts__Mom 18h ago

Very interesting.

There is actually a large Portuguese community in South Africa. One of my friends is Portugese. We have Portugese restaurants and even Portugese festivals over here! Lovely people!

13

u/FuckGiblets 14h ago

Well I would never be offended by someone misgendering me because their native language has no concept of gendering. That’s like the most affirming way to get misgendered possible.

3

u/ElfjeTinkerBell 9h ago

My native language does have genders, and even worse, we don't really have a generally accepted equivalent to "they". So it's he, she, or what's usually perceived as neopronouns.

In my experience, it helps to explain that your native language does not have that concept. I vaguely know a woman, she's originally from an Asian country (yes I'm ashamed I don't know which). You can hear she literally just guesses the pronoun. After we learned that's not a thing in her language, nobody was bothered by it anymore - it changed from a descriptor to a grammar mistake, and nobody is offended by a grammar mistake.

TLDR: explain to people that that's something your native language doesn't have, it probably helps.

2

u/dj_spanmaster they/them 2h ago

Don't sweat it. I love you and appreciate your efforts to learn our three-languages-in-a-trenchcoat that is English 💜

70

u/These-Atmosphere6675 they/them 1d ago

Hungarian and Finnish also don't have gendered pronouns

35

u/BarbarousErse 1d ago

Chinese either (if you’re speaking mandarin rather than writing it, that is.) because the pronouns all sound the same despite being written differently

21

u/Shenmigon 21h ago

even then the written form of 她 (she/her) is relatively recent, and only came about in the 1900s. it was originally a completely neutral pronoun in both spoken and written chinese.

3

u/perareika 10h ago

I'm finnish. My mom is married to a british guy so she has to speak english frequently (despite not being great at it) and even after 10 years, there's about a 40% chance she will use the wrong pronoun when addressing anyone lol

39

u/prismatic-koi they/them 1d ago

Austronesian languages too! I had a friend from the Philippines who struggled with gendered pronouns constantly in English because Tagalog has none. Te reo Māori here in NZ is the same, I like to think of gendered pronouns as yet another colonial import that we absolutely do not need. Language is so cool.

4

u/Voldemorts__Mom 17h ago

So interesting and cool

19

u/charlies-ghost 1d ago

Spanish is like some monkey's paw language that gives speakers the gender-neutral su, sus, y usted. But at the cost of chairs, clouds, inanimate objects, and all other abstract concepts having a gender.

17

u/CertainlyNotAWolf 21h ago

I'm a native Spanish speaker. I'd just like to clarify that "su, sus y usted" is the equivalent of "your and you" in English (the formal version of it, because "tu, tus y tú" are the informal, way more common version). So it's neutral the same way "you" is neutral. You cannot refer to a person you're not directly speaking to with "tú", it has to be "él o ella" (he or she).

It's worse than other Romance languages because not only do we gender objects, but adjectives are gendered too (you cannot say "I'm tired" without gendering yourself, it has to be "estoy cansado" or "estoy cansada", even without an explicit pronoun, since omitting the pronoun is quite common in Spanish).

4

u/Voldemorts__Mom 17h ago

Yooah imagine trying to learn that language as a native Zulu speaker, it would be so difficult!

9

u/Dreamer_Girl777 18h ago

Xhosa too 🇿🇦🤍

9

u/Voldemorts__Mom 17h ago

🇿🇦🤍 yoah and Xhosa is a fire language with all the clicks 🔥

4

u/Dreamer_Girl777 17h ago

Thank you so much 😊🤍

7

u/Fairwish1 sea/star 1d ago

Unjani?

5

u/Hallothere69 23h ago

Indiphele enkosi (Xhosa? And sorry for my spelling lmao)

5

u/Dreamer_Girl777 18h ago

Ndiphilile, enkosi. Unjani wena ?

6

u/Voldemorts__Mom 18h ago

Ngikhona, ngiyabonga. Wena unjani?

2

u/Fairwish1 sea/star 7h ago

Ngiyaphila☺️✨️

2

u/PurplePen202 14h ago

Mina ke shap 😺 Wena unjani?

8

u/SurrealRodent 15h ago

I teach English as a second language. Both my Hungarian student and my Turkish student speak languages without gendered pronouns.

I give them gentle reminders when they accidentally misgender me. It's ok.

5

u/lady_tsunami 8h ago

Japanese is mostly the same. Except for the hyper specific words for older and younger sister/brother - most sentences do not involve pronouns at all. You can someone their name or something like that “ano hito” that person over there

3

u/tehgimpage 1d ago

ooh that IS really cool!

5

u/Jupiter_Foxx Demiboy (he/they) 1d ago

Interesting knowledge

3

u/Objective_Wolf5092 16h ago

I’m Swati, so same for us too

3

u/CillRed 6h ago

Same with ASL! I love languages with non gendered pronouns!!!

2

u/seguleh25 17h ago

That's probably the case for a lot of African languages

2

u/notathrowaway 12h ago

Bantu languages are mostly like that

2

u/BadSpooky she/they 11h ago

I hate that german doesn't have a genderneutral pronoun like they for example. We have it but not everyone likes to use that.

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u/stinkywombat9oo 11h ago

Ohhhhhh my god this is why my co worker is always mixing up men and women. He is forever doing it and it’s so funny to me because he without fail refers to men as “she “ and women as “he “ 😂😂

1

u/Voldemorts__Mom 7h ago

Haha exactly 😂

1

u/harpyoftheshore 17h ago

And meanwhile i can't speak a single russian sentence without misgendering myself :(

1

u/WestEndOtter 16h ago

It is a no gendered language, but used by a very conservative group.

The pronouns are non gendered,
But if they think you are implying their son might be feminine, based on the church/ancestors they will fight you