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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Adding the Portuguese experience, I’ve seen the more inclusive communities within Portugal replaces the “o” and “a” vowels in gendered words with “e”, i.e. todos/todas becomes todes, amigos/amigas becomes amigues, etc.

    For pronouns, there’s currently 3 sets of different gender-neutral pronouns I’ve seen used or in circulation. One is to drop the gendered vowel that terminates the pronoun, i.e. ele/ela becomes el, dele/dela becomes del. This still does have some ambiguity, so I’ve seen a greater adoption of pronouns that I’ve heard come from Latin roots. The two variants I’ve seen more often adopted are ele/ela → elu and ele/ela → ilu.

    These gender-neutral pronouns are still not widely used outside inclusive communities, but I’ve heard of individual cases of wider adoption. I think I’ve heard of a book that was printed by a major publisher that for the first time used gender-neutral pronouns in its translation, and you start seeing some places use these pronouns in place of gendered pronouns in signs.

    In more traditional media it’s still not common, but if they need to, what they tend to use is gender avoidant language, that explicitly avoids using pronouns or gendered names, for example, to replace ele/ela with “esta pessoa”, as “pessoa” is one of a few nouns that can be used that does not imply gender. But it isn’t easy to avoid gendered words and pronouns for a long period of time, and what I’ve heard from a few translator friends is that this is a complex and tiresome process as each sentence needs to be very carefully constructed, instead of the much easier process of the newer but still not widely adopted gender-neutral pronouns.