A genderless language is a natural or constructed human language that has no category of grammatical gender. Some linguists use the term "noun class" to be a broader categorization which includes the categorization by gender as a special case.
The notion of "genderless language" must not be confused with that of gender-neutral language. Also, a discourse in a genderless language is not necessarily gender-neutral, although genderless languages exclude many possibilities to gender-related stereotypes, such as using masculine pronouns when referring to persons by their occupations.
Genderless languages do have various means to recognize gender, such as gender-specific words, ("she", "mother", "son", etc.), as well as gender-specific context, both biological and cultural.
Genderless languages are listed in Noun class: languages without noun classes or grammatical genders.
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The language I have learnt these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo,
And now my tongue’s use is to me no more
Than an unstringèd viol or a harp.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)