When I was in my mid/late twenties, I transitioned from writing stories that used he and she to writing stories where I referred to everyone with le. It was extreme, and I was told that it was difficult, but it was the best way — or so I thought at the time — to drop readers into the actual experience of navigating these cultures. In many of my constructed world’s cultures, gender is conveyed through name endings, behavior, and other contextual clues.
There is one story that I wrote where this actually matters: Epiphany, which became the podcast novel that I did in the mid-2010s. The entire story hinges on the ambiguity of the third person singular pronoun that someone uses — both the formal and informal (yup, there is a distinction!) Tveshi pronouns inflect on number, not gender. Other than that, I wrote using gender-neutral third-person le (singular) and they (plural) whenever the conlang wasn’t divided into he and she.
Apart from that, after a few years, I started to soften away from that hardline literalist interpretation of conlangs and an aggressive desire to get people intimately acquainted with other ways to do grammar. (I mean, I get really excited reading linguistics papers about how pronoun changes are used to construct insults in languages spoken halfway around the world, but I am not most people.) Many English-speakers don’t even know about the variety of ways other languages do noun classes and make gender grammatical. And most Tveshi names have endings that do signal something like he, she, or le! The more I thought about it, the more artificial my approach seemed. I couldn’t one-to-one convey other aspects of the conlangs without careful attention, such as the formality distinctions. Those have always come out in character behavior. I recalled having a post here (the seed of this post; the other one is now gone) in which I discussed how I use conlangs to talk about gender, and it was due for an update to reflect the state of things now.
The system I use now is based on thoughtfully weighing the pros and cons of my approaches. It wasn’t until the late 10s that I wrote a story — A Matter of Oracles — that used he and she. The third-person singular pronoun I tend to use in my work, le, was also present. The social organization system used in my work is very different from ours — usually with very rigid gender roles, but more categorical boxes depending on the specific culture. A Matter of Oracles was set on a planet where the privilege language is Classical Atarahi, and it was confronting the newfound readability and smoothness of the prose that made me think, hey, this is actually what I should be doing elsewhere. So I went back and started to apply that.
Classical Atarahi is a Sāqab language that dates to a few thousand years after the human colonization of the planet Atara. It’s the international standard language on that planet, coexisting alongside many languages that evolved from creoles or the passage of time. Speakers learn it alongside their native languages. Upper classes typically take names in Classical Atarahi; middle and lower classes typically have names in their native languages.
To take a bird’s eye view, Sāqab cultures have restricted gender-inflected pronouns that correspond to he and she. They’re restricted because they cannot be used for anyone who has not completed a gender initiation ritual, which is done in someone’s late teens after reaching the age of majority, and they’re bestowed on men and women. Men and women commit to upholding certain religious and civic activities that are seen as central to manhood and womanhood, and about 80% of the population actually seeks to train for them, with a few percent more dropping out for some reason or other. (It’s a matrilocal culture that practices visiting marriages, and marriages are not tied to gender initiation at all; families expect all female Sāqab to find someone to sire children while in their fertile years.) Gender initiation practices mean that Sāqab rarely ever use gender-inflected pronouns for cultural outsiders, barring diplomats. These pronouns are, after all, honorifics.
This leads to a host of misunderstandings by outsiders, such as the idea that he and she are desirable status markers. The Sāqab peoples ran the last interplanetary empire before its collapse, so Sāqab cultures exist on four planets: Ameisa, Atara, Mntaka, and Qamaq. (Although, to be honest, Mntaka has significant Leissi and Hǫ́ Tiá influence, too, and there are a few diaspora communities on other worlds.) On Ameisa, the Great Peninsular Sāqab countries confer higher status on women due to some significant cultural shifts, so many Tveshi, Iturji, and Narahji speakers mistakenly identify she as a formal pronoun. Karatau Meiyenesi, a character who appears in many of my stories, asks to be referred to using the Malzmā language’s she in formal settings and le in less formal settings to emphasize that jomela (similar, but definitely not identical, to roles like fa’afafine or hijra) in Tveshi culture do receive initiation into their gender and are not sselē. Le knows Malzmā well and is completely aware that le’s adapting usage to assert the importance of ler cultural background and initiatory connection to the Goddess Likhera, to whom all jomela are dedicated as children.
In Sāqab cultures, those without initiation, including children, use a pronoun set I am translating as le. Men and women learn distinct writing systems; sselē (the culture’s opt-outs) can learn all systems, and they can move between men and women’s segregated spaces in households and society freely. Gender initiates lose the ability to move freely. In cultures ranging from Tveshi to Narahji and beyond, initiation is what changes someone’s status from boy/man or girl/woman to something else (jomela, kaju, ozkyev, yadzakma, &c.), and it’s the presence of that initiation that makes me use le for those roles instead of he or she to represent their different status. The fact that sselē are the opposite — again, the ones opting out of initiation — is very unique. In some Sāqab countries like Midway Island, only sselē are eligible for Chancellor, the chief of the executive branch of government. In other countries like Demza, Chancellorship is open to anyone, but sselē typically occupy the office.
So what happens when you’re talking about someone who grows up in a story set in a Sāqab culture? In most cases, adults will use le when describing someone’s childhood, with a marker in the introductory sentence that means le who eventually took she (or the opposite). It doesn’t translate easily into English. The words girl and boy are typically not used until a child’s mid-teens, and they indicate someone who is a candidate for womanhood or manhood — le’s going to preparatory classes for gender initiation and can’t use a gendered honorific pronoun yet.
Here’s an example: Īðī māqomu us mīki hēramōkotgēzi gotomis. Tisoðwō ramōkotgēzi. At five, le herself loved rain. Le danced in it. The -gēzi on the verb indicates gender-neutral third person singular. Gotomis is the standalone pronoun for a woman, which translates to both she and herself. Subsequent sentences use -gēzi without the additional pronoun. There’s also a special standalone pronoun for children, tīta.
One of my favorite things to do while writing a story is to figure out how to best convey culture/language through my own language choices. When I need a gender-neutral pronoun (GNP), I almost always use le — at least in fiction writing. Singular inflection is important to me, but the initial consonant of le is also very clear even for speakers coming from non-l/r distinction languages. None of the characters in stories set in the Seven Papers speaks English, so I can focus on what I want out of GNP — a pronoun that reflects the social mores of the work’s reference language. Pronouns are grammatical shorthands for specific persons, and once someone is used to le for certain characters in a story, it should fade into the background like any other element of sentence construction. Only using it where required gives readers additional touchstones to use as they work through understanding the a priori cultures in my setting. This is the happy middle path that I should have chosen from the beginning.
Outside of the Seven Papers setting, I use whichever GNP makes the most sense, and that really relies on knowing the story and its character(s). I have one story that uses ze to refer to an alien; this is set in the close future (several centuries ahead). In both, GNP coexists with the gender-inflected pronouns he and she. I’ve got an idea percolating for a story set a few more hundred years from now where they is singular and th’all is plural, but nothing has happened with that.
I hope that y’all have found this interesting as a linguistics groupie and conlanger’s perspective on making active choices about choosing pronouns to use in stories.
(This was originally posted on 19 February 2018 and significantly revised on 20 May 2022 to reflect changes in practice.)