A Brief Introduction to Gender in Slavic Languages
I dedicate this post to all non-binary people in general, and non-binary people whose native language is a Slavic language in particular. I love you and support you!
I've seen several versions of the following meme in the past few months:
"Non-binary in [insert a Slavic language] is [word for "non-binary" in masculine form] or [word for "non-binary" in feminine form], depending on the person's gender."
And I cannot express how much I hate that lame fucking thing!!!
In case you didn't get it, the message is that even if people come up with words like "non-binary", it is not possible to actually use them without conforming to a gender binary anyway.
And yeah, it's not always shared with malicious intent. I have seen it used as an example of very real struggles non-binary people need to face, how they're constantly forced into cathegories that don't fit them, a kind of "we are fucked by languages, aren't we" dark humour thing etc.
Unfortunately, more often than not, the underlying sentiment seems to be that you can make up fancy words, but you can't escape the reality that you're either a boy or a girl.
Even though it's glaringly false, who cares, right?
And I mean both the small-minded belief and the meme itself.
I genuinely believe that it was originally written (1) by a person whose first language is English and who doesn't have a good feel of how gendered languages work, and (2) about a non-Slavic language, maybe Spanish or French? Oh, and also (3) a person who is unkind, or stupid, or both.
Anyway, in celebration of Pride Month, here is a crash course on gender in Slavic languages for all the language nerds and gender nerds, with love.
Lesson 1 - How Do Gendered Languages Work?
In a gendered language, we can divide all words into three groups: (A) those that have no gender at all, (B) those that have one fixed gender, and (C) those that can take any gender and therefore have multiple forms, one for each gender.
Group A consists of words like prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and many verb forms. They and only they are truly genderless, in the grammatical sense. The category of gender doesn't apply to them at all, the same way grammatical tense does not apply to nouns.
Group B is basically all the nouns. Every noun has a gender that is its fixed grammatical property. When you check a noun in a dictionary, it will tell you what gender this specific noun is.
Group C can be defined as "words that are somehow grammatically linked to the noun". Like adjectives and some verb forms. They always "borrow" the gender of the noun they are describing. This means that while they don't have their own gender, they always exist in a gendered form.
Lesson 2 - Grammatical Genders in Slavic Languages
For singular forms, there are three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Yes, let me repeat it: THREE genders, including NEUTER.
This is true for every Slavic language I am aware of. Not all of them use neuter gender to the same degree; some pretty much replaced it with masculine, but at least in theory, it is always there.
(I am not getting into plurals here. For many reasons.)
That means that every singular noun is either masculine, feminine, or neuter. It also means that every adjective has three singular forms - masculine, feminine and neuter, and when you want to use an adjective in a sentence or a phrase, you need to pick the form that matches the noun it's meant to refer to.
Lesson 3 - Grammatical "Gender" vs. Actual Gender
(This is the part that I've noticed people whose native language isn't grammatically gendered - like English - struggle with a lot, and easily misunderstand.)
There is a significant overlap between grammatical gender and biological/semantic gender but they are NOT the same thing.
Yes, for living beings, especially people, grammatical gender aligns with their actual gender. Words like "man", "boy", "father", "brother" etc. are grammatically masculine. "Woman", "girl", "mother", "sister" etc. are grammatically feminine. Also, every male name is grammatically masculine, and every female name is grammatically feminine.
However, there are words whose grammatical gender diverges from the actual gender of the person they describe.
For instance, in my mother tongue, the word for "human" is grammatically masculine, and the word for "person" is grammatically feminine; however, semantically both are gender-neutral, can be used for anybody, and it is in fact very natural to use them for anybody.
Let's look at a sentence that translates to "My bother is a very calm and patient person". The word "my" will have a masculine form, because it refers directly to "brother", which is a grammatically masculine word. But both "calm" and "patient" will take feminine forms because they refer to the word "person", which is grammatically feminine.
We are talking about a man, but proper grammar requires us to use feminine forms. It is not jarring. It is not "woke". It is a normal way to talk and has always been.
We could change the sentence to "my sister is a very calm and patient human" (it sounds a bit odd in English for some reason?) and then we would be in a reversed situation - "my" will be feminine, but "calm" and "patient" will be masculine. So now we are using masculine forms to describe a woman, and again, it is 100% normal and common.
In both cases, even though we use words whose grammatical gender diverges from the actual gender of the person we are talking about, we are not misgendering anyone.
And that's because grammatical gender isn't actually a gender. It isn't even called that in my mother tongue, but rather by a word that more accurately translates to "kind" or "type". It's just a grammatical category.
It's a topic for a whole other post, but this is especially true for inanimate objects. I sometimes feel that native English speakers have a hard time understanding that just because, say, "table" is grammatically masculine, and we use "he" instead of "it", we do not actually perceive it as a male or attribute it with some masculine qualities... We really don't.
OK, so about that meme...
Let me quote it again:
"Non-binary in [insert a Slavic language] is [word for "non-binary" in masculine form] or [word for "non-binary" in feminine form], depending on the person's gender."
Do you see where the issue is?
Yes, the most infuriating and glaringly obvious mistake is omitting the neuter gender.
Even though I still suspect that the meme might have been originally about a language like Spanish or French, which do indeed have only two grammatical genders, and yes, jokes and memes get "adapted" for other countries/languages/cultures all the time and it's not uncommon for it to be really forced and just not work, I still cannot excuse the level of wilful ignorance necessary to make the Slavic version of this specific meme and still conveniently only mention two genders.
If we correct it:
"Non-binary in [insert a Slavic language] is [word for "non-binary" in masculine form] or [word for "non-binary" in feminine form], or [word for "non-binary" in neuter form], depending on the person's gender."
it's suddenly not that "funny" anymore, is it?
But it gets even weaker when the more subtle stuff enters the chat. Let me remind you that in gendered languages, gender is a plain grammatical category.
"Depending on the person's gender" sounds dramatic and may not be technically wrong, but it actually should be "depending on the noun's gender".
So if we correct it again
"Non-binary in [insert a Slavic language] is [word for "non-binary" in masculine form] or [word for "non-binary" in feminine form], or [word for "non-binary" in neuter form], depending on the person's noun's gender."
there's nothing left that you can poke fun at because this is how EVERY ADJECTIVE WORKS!
If your language isn't gendered, it might seem like some kind of paradox that the word "non-binary" exists in masculine and feminine forms, or that it somehow undermines the meaning of the word "non-binary". But it really isn't and doesn't. Every adjective has masculine, feminine, and neuter forms. Every single one. Not just "non-binary", but "masculine" and "feminine" too. All of them do.
Adjectives don't have their own gender and always take the gender of the noun they refer to, regardless of their meaning. Take that, non-binary people!
Also, please note that when we replace the word "person" with a more accurate word "noun", the stupid joke doesn't even work for French or Spanish or other languages with only two genders? Because even if you can't say "I am non-binary" without being forced into a gender binary (which, again, in Slavic languages, you totally can thanks to neuter gender), you can always say "I am a non-binary person" and you are no longer forced to misgender yourself.
Thank you for reading.
