Did you know that Chinese didn’t have a word for “She” until about 100 years ago? In fact, Chinese operated without a female 3rd person pronoun for thousands of years, and it wasn’t a problem – until interaction with the west. Watch this video to learn the fascinating (albeit winding) history of Chinese gendered pronouns.
I’ve got a number of indigenous friends, and Shawnee doesn’t have gendered pronouns either! Didn’t even add them, too.
That’s interesting. I know very little about indigenous North American languages. Near where i grew up the main languages without gendered pronouns are Turkish and Hungarian.
Apparently it is more common for languages to not have gendered pronouns than you would think if you only looked at European languages.
This analysis seems to suggest that only 30% of languages worldwide have them?