Non-gendered language:
“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world… The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it." - James Baldwin
Language and literature are very closely connected and we via the spectrum of language view literature.
Communication is a way for a culture to associate some meanings to some sounds and this mapping depends upon what the culture values the most. For example, it’s hard to find the equivalent of kangaroo in Hindi or Tamil. Now what we believe about the social world shapes our perception about language. Since a long time in every society male domination has resulted into the use of certain phrases like “the mind of man is capable of anything “here man is taken synonymously for both females and needless to say non-binary was abruptly excluded. . Language is a powerful tool for claiming and explaining our own identities and building relationships that support and affirm us.
Therefore, we need to foster a more inclusive way of communication, inclusive of the LGBTQI+ community. In this backdrop, the need for 21st-century communication is non-gendered language. Apparently, gender associations are more of a subjective interpretation and majorly not a logical reason of phonetics. Sex is often a biological term with consistent meaning based on x and y chromosomes while gender is a psychological term, how you choose to express yourself in a society, more of man or less of female and vice-versa. That is what roles you choose for yourself.
Feminist philosopher Judith Butler brought out about gender performativity i.e being born as male or female doesn’t determine behaviour but the way people adopt ways to fit into society does. Gender is a social construct. That makes us advocate for a more neutral language to bring change on the ground level.
As per 2011 census , there are total of 121 languages and 270 mother tongues in India . No country in the world comes close to matching the linguistic diversity in India. All Indian languages fall into 4 groups – Aryan, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, and Afro-Asiatic. The extinct and endangered language of the Andaman from the fifth.
Surprisingly, Malayalam has no gender yet has gendered pronouns. Odia and Maithili have no gender in either nouns or pronouns. North-east too except Assam and Garo have no gendered language. While Hindi has genders in both nouns and pronouns. Therefore, it’s hard to learn or use grammatically correct Hindi by a non-native speaker.
Yet, for many other gendered languages reforms need to be brought out to make them more adoptable. In stark contrast to most other Indo-European languages English doesn’t at present retain any grammatical genders, it however in the distant past did have gendered grammar.
Gender-neutral pronouns like you are used now irrespective of a person as opposed to older days when ‘thou’ meant singular and you meant plural. Similarly, words too evolved in their meaning, in the 19th century “Awful” meant inspiring while today it means ‘gross’. Thus, demystifying the belief that language originates from dictionaries, dictionaries are the warehouses of language that develop around people and that people use freely. Similarly, trans, queer, and non-binary people are redefining their identity by switching and creating words they wanna be referred to.
Embracing creativity in language, taking agency over words, and bending and twisting languages to serve us better and bring us closer is the need for 21st-century communication.