this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
335 points (95.9% liked)

Technology

75494 readers
2890 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

based cloudflare

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 days ago (2 children)

It's actually a very contentious grammatical issue in Germany from what I have been told by a German friend. That there is definitely a contingency of people pushing for more gender neutral language and a large amount of pushback from those who think the entire idea is absurd because of how gendered the language is.

I can see a bit of both sides of the argument. It's important to make people feel welcomed and not like being a male is the default for everything. On the other hand, language evolves often very slowly and you can't just force people to change the language entirely overnight. It does sound like much of the pushback is less political in nature and more grammatical as adding neutral phrases to a gendered language becomes quickly a complex task with complex new words. However, some of the pushback is also political in nature, so it's hard to gauge whether the Ladybird situation was truly political or more grammatical at it's core.

[–] vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 days ago

As a Russian language speaker, I can tell you any gender-neutral language is absolutely impossible with Russian. The old kind of egalitarian (just normal really) language was to use the same form and gender of the word denoting profession or position as with male person, when it's a woman. Because the old feminitives usually meant "wife of someone of that profession", with a good deal of confusion whether they mean that or actually a woman of that role, and also they have sort of a flavor of vulgarity.

There's a modern (very limited to leftist fashion) tendency of inventing feminitives not common before.

Like for "author" there's "автор" (male form usually used for women too), "авторша" (traditional feminitive with a flavor of rudeness), "авторка" (new fashionable feminitive nobody really uses).

Or for "psychologist" there's "психолог" (normal male form), "психологичка" (not traditional, kinda rude feminitive), "психологиня" (new feminitive really used often enough, but that's when it means someone your age with that being like below 35).

[–] jungle@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yep. I'm a native Spanish speaker and I'm also old. Spanish is similar to German in that the male version of words is already gender neutral. But there's a huge effort to make it truly gender neutral, and I understand the reason and support the idea. Having lived many years in an English speaking country and in corporate environments, I use "they" in English without even thinking. It comes naturally to me, especially as a manager talking about people I manage, to protect their identity.

But there's no way in hell I'm using gender neutral Spanish because it sounds extremely stupid to me. It's a complete distortion of the language, and I have to make a huge effort not to think less of people who use it. None of my friends or family uses it.