Dear people who speak #Dutch,
what's the neutral pronoun situation? If I wanted to refer to someone but didn't know their gender or pronouns, how would I go about that?

I just tried to use - instead of 'ze hebben' - 'ze heeft' before realizing that's the same as... 'ze heeft'.

@naln1 It's a shitshow, basically. There's hen/hun that some people use, but that a lot of other people have trouble with (somehow singular use of conventionally plural pronouns doesn't quite 'feel' right in Dutch). There's also 'die', for which there's some arguments: langzaldieleven.nl/ -- but it doesn't seem to be very widely adopted among queer folks at least.

Personally, I tend to use 'die' unless otherwise specified, but honestly none of the options are great... (and that's not even going into crap like gendered job description names :/)

@joepie91 Thanks! Indeed I sorta found these two solutions, but I wanted to hear the cultural perspective on it, too. I think I'll mostly stick to 'die' when referring to someone I don't know well or don't care to know, at least.

@naln1 Yeah, my impression is that that's the safest bet for now. Hen/hun definitely seems to be more preferred as specified non-binary pronouns, but I've never really encountered anyone either offended *or* confused by my use of 'die' as a default neutral pronoun - even if others don't really use it.

Follow

@naln1 (It's all a bit hard to say even as a queer person in NL, because NL is pretty... behind on the whole gender thing, culturally speaking)

· · Web · 0 · 1 · 1
Sign in to participate in the conversation
Pixietown

Small server part of the pixie.town infrastructure. Registration is closed.