Non-binary pronouns in Irish
In honor of Pride month (despite this post being a couple days late), I did a little bit of research into non-binary pronouns in Irish, with the goal being able to tell you all how to use them.
The first instinct for English speakers would be to use “they” or siad/iad, but siad is only ever used to talk about multiple people. Anybody who doesn’t already know that you’re talking about someone who uses non-binary pronouns would just get confused.
The research I did showed a few non-binary pronouns, but nothing official or widely used.
duí — comes from the Irish word for “person”, duine, but doesn’t intuitively make sense to someone that doesn’t know it
siú — apparently originates from Duolingo, and was created as a pronoun to bear resemblance to sé/sí, and may be useful in spoken Irish (it sounds similar to a pronoun, so someone who doesn’t know what you’re talking about may be more likely to understand you)
sin — from what I’ve seen online, sin (literally “that”) is actually in use for some non-binary native speakers, but it still isn’t very prevalent (it would probably be understood by most people speaking Irish)
sé — this is the masculine pronoun, but it is also used in situations where the gender of the subject is unknown (or doesn’t exist), the only problem is that using binary pronouns is often exactly what non-binary people are trying to avoid
If none of these (rather unappealing) options appeal to you, I did find an example online of someone who lives in Ireland, and occasionally speaks Irish with non-binary people. They acknowledge that Irish doesn’t have any non-binary pronouns, and talk about the system that they and their friends use in Irish. Simply, they make a nickname into a pronoun. It isn’t a great solution, but it apparently works in practice.
Finally, I’m going to talk a bit about the use of the autonomous tense in Irish. There exists a tense in Irish that’s most similar to the passive tense in English. From what I’ve read online, though, the autonomous tense can stand on its own, and also (unlike English), specifically implies that there is someone doing the actions. I’ve seen it translated more accurately as using the word “one” in English (ex. one finds it difficult to find information about the autonomous tense online). I’ve read that this is used when someone doesn’t know the gender of the subject. This seems like a decent suggestion, but from my understanding of non-binary identities, some people identify more as specifically non-gendered (which this tense may be good for), but some people specifically prefer to identify as a non-binary gender and may prefer to use one of the above. All in all, there aren’t great choices for non-binary pronouns in Irish, but there are choices nonetheless. I hope this can serve as a helpful resource for those who need it.