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:
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)