Wow, this is really cool. And it would be pretty directly applicable to English, which can implement a gender neutral, third person pronoun fairly easily compared to some other languages.

Can I ask you how the Swedish implements gender in adjectives and articles? I’ve had no exposure to Swedish but I speak French, Russian, and German and learning those languages has given me some idea of the complexity of adapting gender-neutral usage. For example, Russian and German are highly gendered languages, but have some gender-neutral-ready grammar. A Russian adjective that ends in “o” is gender-neutral. German has the gender-neutral article “das." Adjectives can get complicated in German, though.

But French? Ooh la la. Like the other romance languages, it is highly binary gendered, without neutral gender markers. This is really challenging, because a mountain of work is required for practical language reform, with creating a gender-neutral pronoun only the tip of the iceberg.

Just to explain what I mean, it is grammatically impossible for a French or Italian speaker to speak of themselves without gendering themselves. (A man or boy who is happy is heureux, a woman or girl is heureuse. There is no gender-neutral way to construct adjectives, though activists are trying to create ways.)

So I’m wondering how Swedish handles issues beyond the third-person pronouns.

And it’s worth pointing out that in English we have it really easy compared to many languages. For us, pretty much all we have to think about is a gender-neutral third person pronoun. We can count our blessings!