Gender-Neutral Pronouns in Romance

Languages like Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese evolved from Latin, inheriting a grammatical gender system. Historically, this meant most things were either masculine or feminine. This system is now facing one of its biggest modern challenges: how to adapt to a world that increasingly recognizes gender as a spectrum, not a binary. The result is a vibrant, grassroots linguistic revolution.

The Grammatical Gender Hurdle

To understand the challenge, you have to appreciate just how deep grammatical gender runs. It’s not about whether a table (la mesa in Spanish, la table in French) is biologically female; it’s a grammatical category that requires agreement across the sentence.

Let’s take a simple phrase: “My new friends are tired.”

• In Spanish, if the friends are all male or a mixed group, you’d say: “Mis amigos nuevos están cansados.” (masculine)
• If the friends are all female, it becomes: “Mis amigas nuevas están cansadas.” (feminine)

Notice how everything changes: the possessive pronoun, the noun, the adjective, and the participle all have to match in gender. This brings us to a core issue for advocates of inclusive language: the “generic masculine.” Traditionally, the masculine form has been used as the default for mixed groups or individuals of unknown gender. Critics argue this renders women and non-binary people linguistically invisible, reinforcing a male-centric worldview.

So, how do you refer to a non-binary person, or a group, in a truly neutral way? You can’t just swap out a pronoun; you have to rethink the entire system. And that’s exactly what speakers are starting to do.

Spanish: The Rise of ‘Elle’ and the ‘-e’ Suffix

Spain and Latin America have become major hubs for gender-neutral innovation, with one solution gaining significant traction: the termination ‘-e’.

Early attempts at written neutrality involved using symbols like the at-sign (@) or the letter ‘x’ (e.g., amig@s, amigxs). While visually inclusive, these forms are unpronounceable and created a barrier between written and spoken language. Out of this challenge, the ‘-e’ ending emerged as a spoken, consistent, and elegant solution.

This gives rise to a complete new set of words:

• Pronoun: Alongside él (he) and ella (she), we have elle (they, singular).
• Nouns: amigo/amiga becomes amigue.
• Articles: el/la becomes le (though this is less standardized).
• Adjectives: cansado/cansada becomes cansade.

A full sentence might look like this: Elle es mi amigue. Es muy inteligente y simpátique. (They are my friend. They are very intelligent and nice.)

This system, often referred to as “lenguaje inclusivo” (inclusive language), has been championed by youth movements, LGBTQ+ activists, and academic institutions. Of course, it faces stiff resistance. The Real Academia Española (RAE), the official guardian of the Spanish language, has repeatedly rejected the use of ‘-e’, deeming it unnecessary and alien to the language. Despite this, the use of elle and the ‘-e’ suffix continues to grow from the ground up, a testament to the power of speakers to shape their own linguistic reality.

French: ‘Iel’ Enters the Dictionary

The French-speaking world is having a similar, albeit distinct, conversation. The most prominent gender-neutral pronoun to emerge is iel, a blend of the masculine il (he) and the feminine elle (she). Its plural form is iels.

The debate over iel hit a fever pitch in 2021 when the influential dictionary Le Robert added it to its online edition. The move sparked a national controversy, with politicians and traditionalists decrying it as an “ideological” attack on the French language. The Académie Française, France’s notoriously conservative language authority, fiercely opposes such innovations.

The challenge in French is arguably even greater than in Spanish. While iel provides a pronoun, creating neutral agreement for adjectives and participles is much trickier. French has many irregular feminine endings, and there is no single, easy-to-implement neutral suffix like the Spanish ‘-e’.

Several methods are being tried, with varying success:

• The point médian (middot): This is a written form that includes both endings, such as “les électeur·rice·s” (the voters). While visually inclusive, it is criticized as clunky, unpronounceable, and inaccessible to screen-reading software for the visually impaired.
• Epicene Language: This involves using words that are naturally gender-neutral. For example, instead of saying “les auteurs” (the authors, masculine default), one might say “les personnes qui écrivent” (the people who write).
• New Endings: Some have proposed new endings, but none have achieved widespread consensus.

For now, iel is the most established part of the French inclusive language puzzle, but the grammatical nuts and bolts are still very much being worked out.

Innovations Across the Romance World

The movement isn’t confined to Spanish and French. All across the Romance-speaking world, speakers are experimenting.

• Portuguese: Particularly in Brazil, the situation mirrors that of Spanish. An “elu” system (parallel to Spanish elle) is used for pronouns, paired with the same ‘-e’ suffix for nouns and adjectives (e.g., amigue). The debate is just as passionate and politically charged.
• Italian: Italian presents a unique phonological challenge. The proposed neutral endings—the asterisk (*) and the schwa (ə), a vowel sound like the ‘a’ in “about”—are gaining currency in activist and university circles. You might see written greetings like “Car* tutt*” or “Carə tuttə” (Dear all), replacing the masculine default “Cari tutti.” The schwa is pronounceable, giving it an advantage, but it remains a niche practice far from mainstream acceptance.
• Romanian: Romanian has a grammatical neuter gender, but it’s used for objects and concepts, not people. The conversation around a human non-binary pronoun is less developed than in other Romance languages but is slowly beginning to emerge in progressive spaces.

More Than Just Words: A Cultural Shift

It’s easy to get lost in the grammatical weeds of pronouns and suffixes, but it’s crucial to remember what this is really about. The push for gender-neutral language is not just a linguistic exercise; it’s a social and cultural movement.

Proponents argue that language doesn’t just describe reality; it shapes it. By creating space for non-binary identities within the grammatical structures of their languages, speakers are fighting for recognition, respect, and visibility. They are challenging the idea that a male-centric default is neutral and pushing back against centuries of patriarchal tradition embedded in their mother tongues.

The resistance from official academies, who often appeal to “purity”, “history”, or “clarity”, highlights the tension between language as a preserved artifact and language as a living, breathing tool for communication. But as history shows, language always evolves. It is shaped not by committees, but by the collective will of its speakers. The rise of elle, iel, and the schwa isn’t a corruption of these beautiful languages, but a powerful demonstration of their resilience and their capacity to adapt to the needs of the people who use them every day.