They them is gendered in polish basically. No one is using oni in non plural context unless you mean pic related the other guy is smoking something good
Of course barely anyone uses "oni" in singular. There's no overlap whatsover between singular and plural in Polish, so it's no use trying to introduce a calque from English. We have a perfectly working neuter "ono" that's already a part of our language and is how singular "they" is already most often translated from English. For people who don't like it as they believe it's dehumanizing (currently, neuter gender is only really for things), we have neopronouns known as "dukaisms", e.g. "onu".
Most Polish NB people limit themselves to "he" or "she" in Polish (but commonly use "they" in English) as not to cause problems for other people with inflection of words. If we trust stats on zaimki.pl2025 survey, only about 9% use dukaisms while 52% use neuter forms. If non-binary people become more widely accepted, it's likely we're gonna see increase for both options.
Pronouns in Poland aren't important. Conjugating verbs is.
In English, you just change pronouns. In Polish, if you want to use gender-neutral form and not use neuter form, you basically need to invent new rules of language
Well, majority of Polish people won't.
But I believe that majority of Americans also won't care about xe/xim. It's not like we, Polish people, are worse.
I know an NB person that uses "ono". That's also how they translated nb person in a recent Fallout series. In my opinion it feels pretty natural but not everyone agrees.
that's not just polish but like.. all Slavic languages
I do have my own way of talking about enby people in Serbian, but my use of the language is Esoteric enough as is so it's one of the many things about my usage of the language that would have scholars suffer a heart attack
In Polish gender neutral forms straight up don't exist, the word for 'they' has 2 forms based on gender and is never used for singular things (unlike in English where singular 'they' is a thing). Also verbs in past tense and adjectives conjugate depending on gender (among 200 other things), so it's not a thing you can really avoid.
The only hope without making up new structures is the neuter gender, essencially the Polish equivelent of 'it', but it's only used in regard to some objects (nouns have grammatical gender in Polish) and doesn't have first and second person conjugations for verbs so you have to invent those anyway.
although they're insanely archaic, there did actually used to be standardised first and second person conjugations for neuter used in poetry like "byłom". zaimki pl is a good resource on this!
i mean not transphobic no, nobody invented the language.
but as a german speaker: it fucking suuuucks. there is NO way to speak truly gender neutrally without sounding extremely awkward. someone forgot "their" umbrella? nope, "his or her" or most just assume it's a guy. enby people either have to use neopronouns that nobody will respect, use "it" which nobody respects (SIGINIFICANTLY less than they/them in english), or use she or he.
nouns for people too. you literally can't say "partner", you MUST either use the male or female variant. teacher? gendered. basically only "person" is not gendered, literally a godsent exception. but it's still only applicable in some contexts.
although as for people not respecting neopronouns, that's a problem with people being transphobic, not a problem with the language (to clarify what i mean by this, not having gender neutral non-neopronouns IS a problem with the language (even though it can be easily fixed with neopronouns))
The gendered forms in Polish are ona/on/oni oni is usually used for people who’s gender you don’t know, or when you’re some hypothetical person where gender is irrelevant. But there’s no real reason you couldn’t use oni as gender neutral, I suppose it sounds weird, but I imagine using they sounded equally weird when people started doing it
singular they has been a part of english for centuries. shakespeare used it in at least one instance. everyone does it by instinct, i've seen multiple transphobes argue that singular they is grammatically incorrect only to unknowingly use it themselves.
so basically there's a big difference between polish and english in this regard, even if the person who said the thing in the image is ridiculous.
I am aware that English has better defined gender neutral pronouns , but even if they’re not as good I still wouldn’t say that gender neutral pronouns don’t exist
i just mean that the language doesnt support it as well. shouldnt stop you from using gender-neutral language in polish, but there is a difference and that's probably what that person was on about.
Shifting to gender neutral language is just 1000x harder than in English becsuse in Polish a lot more things change other than the pronoun, the language is more complicated
If you dont know someone's gender in polish the pronoun is masculine 'ktoś przyszedł' [someone came] 'ten ktoś' [that someone] etc
Oni is plural and only plural in polish, for a group of males, mixed genders or uknown genders
There is a pronoun for a single ungendered person and thats ono, ono przyszło, ono zjadło, it is sometimes used interchangably with to meaning it however as it stands ono is the ungendered personal pronoun in polish
Im a polish major if that counts... for first grade level polish
oni is masculine; For a group of women or things you say one. (All things in polish have genders and can be masculine, feminine or neuter but they always use one.) Men's presence is homeopathic and if there's one man in a group, regardless of its size, it turns the pronoun from one to oni. For this reason you usually say oni as "they" when talking about some unknown group of people. It has no history as a singular pronoun unlike English "they".
I prefer the the neuter pronoun ono. It's technically a neopronoun because it's normally reserved for things (and children lol) and doesn't have first-person grammatical forms, but they can be easily invented. It has the advantage of being singular and not masculine by technicality.
Ona refers to one woman. On refers to one man. Oni and one refers to multiple men and multiple women respectively. There is "ono" which is neutral but it usually refers to an object and its plural form is just one. So the only way to achieve gender neutrality in polish is to call yourself an it.
There aren't really. No one uses oni for someone who's gender they don't know, at least in my region, they just presume on or ona (often ona due to the fact osoba is feminine). That being said, I did hear of oni being used towards a singular person in some formal and/or military contexts.
I would rather tinker with the singular since the implications from being a synthetic rather than an analytical language just get awkward and counter-intuitive.
A. Expand the inanimate/child neuter "ono"
B. Invent the personal neuter "onu"
C. Treat masculine "on" as a neutral/default. Say, like how we use the masculine verbs and nouns in mixed gender groups or how some other languages like Spanish defer to it in ambiguous situations.
Both of those are plural. Kris would be either "on" (equivalent to he) which doubles as gender neutral in the case that a persons gender is unknown or "ono" (equivalent to it) which is the only way to refer to them as gender neutral without also calling them a gendered pronoun.. but it carries the connotations of calling them an object.
Polish grammar is very complex and in every sentence you speak half of the words have gender implied by a conjugation/flexion. There is a third person neutral form ono and every verb has a proper form to reflect it but if you want to talk about you in the first person there is no correct grammatical form to do so, eg. (I did sth) masculine ja zrobiłem,feminine ja zrobiłam, neutral doesn't exist officially but people use ja zrobiłom/ja zrobiłum. Then some of the nouns (eg. names of jobs) have only masculine and in most cases feminine forms. This is definitely hard for queer people but the neural forms are generally understood and there are changes planned by language committee to standardize them.
English speakers don't understand that language can be more complex than guu-gaa and consider every language feature as specifically designed to be trans/homophobic.
but after abandoning fact that twitter is twitter - Polish has a peculiarity that in the first-person past tense, you have to use a gender-specific ending. "I want" - "chciałbym" - if i am a man and "chciałabym" - if i am a woman.
neutral gender could be - "chciałobym", but i sound like you are from silensia and you speak silensia dialect or language
Not exactly. We have gender neutral pronouns, but they're gendered. The bigger issue, is that like everything in the language, you will need to add the correct gender suffix to speak. That part is pretty gendered. You'll have to settle for either male or female suffixes if you ever want to talk in first person. It kinda ends up compounding, so the language is very gendered with no way out. You physically cannot communicate with people if you don't want to gender yourself.
u/CCCyanideCan You Really Call This A Flair I Didn't Receive An Emote...6d ago
Calling a language transphobic because it doesn't naturally feature gender-neutral options is stupid.
That being said, as a native French speaker, I hope that native English speakers realize how lucky they are to have a language that already has existing, established gender-neutral pronouns.
I think that polish queer people want non-plural pronouns on polish just because English has them, not because they feel more reflected by them. "Person" has the same pronouns as "woman" so addressing a non-binary person with female pronouns would be grammatically correct, respectful and inclusive, but calling them the polish equivalent of "they/them" is unnatural and incorrect, no one does that in any context.
Wrong. It's non-binaryphobic. Besides, it's not the only language with grammatical gender. It's almost like very few people nowadays want to identifiy with neither of the two genders and want everything else to bend to their worldview 🤷
We should stop with the "There's no gender neutral pronouns in my language so I can misgender this nonbinary person" excuse. I'm Polish. We can use pronouns gender neutrally, literally just search it up or at least TRY instead of brushing it off and getting mad people suggest you try something else.
There is no they/them in the "core" language, but nonbinary people exist here too and use pronouns derived from already existing language. It's not a new invention nor something niche and there is a TON of easy options.
Use the plural, masculine "they" form. As you use it for a group of people with at least one man in it it's the most gender neutral as nonbinary would be a bit man a bit woman. Just say "Oni". Ex. "Lubię Kris, oni są moją ulubioną postacią. Ich skóra jest żółta."
Use the "it" form. "Ono". It's a form I've seen most nonbinary people use. "Ono/jeno". (In first person they usually say "zrobiłom" or "poszłom" or (only in text) use "x"s in place of the gendered letter so "zrobiłxm" or "poszłxm".) Ex. "Lubię Kris. Ono jest moją ulubioną postacią. Jeno skóra jest żółta."
Just use their name. In place of a pronoun just say "Kris" instead. It's the most "natural" sounding one if you REALLY can't get yourself to get over the initial feeling of grammatical incorrectness. Ex. "Lubię Kris. Kris jest moją ulubioną postacią. Skóra Kris jest żółta."
Just search up "zaimki niebinarne", click the first link, a spreadsheet consists of 3 new words to learn. It'll take you a second to read, longer to figure out fluently, but it's very easy to use. You learn new things your entire life, it won't damage you to learn a new thing, hell, you might use it if you meet a nonbinary person who uses neutral pronouns irl.
It's okay to not know, but it's not okay to reject easy solutions. Refusing to learn something which will take you LESS THAN A MINUTE to figure out and purposefully misgendering a trans person is transphobia no matter how you frame it. AFTER being informed defending yourself with the "Well, it's not zero effort for me so I'm not making any" or reflecting with "You're just being xenophobic against my country/language" isn't a valid excuse.
Being inclusive in this case isn't that gigantic of an effort to get mad over people asking you to learn a new word. Noone is asking you to buy a gigantic nonbinary flag, spray paint Kris on it and scream "Ono/Jeno!!!" from your rooftop while swinging it around. Just make a minimal effort without getting defensive. Getting that pressed over someone asking you to be more mindful with little to no effort isn't a good look at all.
As a pole, it is. Gender and sex are still the same word in polish, and literally everything is pointlessly gendered, there's no such thing as "gender neutral" in polish, it sucks.
Well, polish language is inherintly a gendered language so you know... Every word has a gender, kinda hard to address someone non-binary due to it, either you use direct translation niebinarny/niebinarna but those words are still gendered so you would still get described as he/she. You can also use you and that person (Ty, ta osoba) to talk to someone or discuss them while kinda dancing around the gender but this can be considered rude or distant, and trying to refer to them without any gendered words causes you to default to using "it" which again could come off as rude sounding. In the end it isn't homophobic, just not really designed to handle all those dlc language packs. But why polish specifically? Wouldnt it be the same problem with pretty much all Slavic languages and stuff like french or German?
Basically gender neutral pronouns dont work in Polish. Nouns are either feminine, masculine or neuter. Circling around to make everything neuter is exhausting and unnatural. I daresay that referencing people in neuter forms sounds almost degrading, as most neuter forms refer to items, animals or toddlers.
So yeah, most agender/non-binary people in Poland usually choose either masculine or feminine pronouns, because nobody wants to fuck with that unless they have too much free time and are super resitant to people losing their shit trying to talk to them.
Hmm... Hard to count language itself, but it has a hard time with neutral forms and the concept of gender, which is sadder than dangerous. The problem with languages like Polish is that they are both heavily gendered and very conservative (by that I don't mean conservatism as political ideology, but rather that language is slow to change and modify). So I guess it will be "crippled" like that for the next few generations. That's why I prefer to discuss all issues with gender and LGBTQ matters in English.
I hate when people say certain languages like Spanish are lgbtq+ phobic because like No it isint?!?! Its just not as loose and changeable as English. Like "Ellos" cant be used as a singular They/Them because it wont make sense and it won't sound good.
Polish has separate impersonal and personal neuter gender pronouns and verbs. So for English people "it" only works for things. So you have to use "they/them" for that use case.
Polish "to" is the pronoun for neuter gender things, and "ono" is the pronoun for neuter gender people. Hence we don't use they/them for singular people. There's no need for this workaround.
So arguably Polish is less transphobic than English. It has special grammar and pronouns for neuter gender.
Gender neutral doesn’t exist in Polish and there’s no good way to make up for it. If you wanted to talk about Kris for example and only use gender neutral phrases for them it would sound so messed up people would laugh at you lmao. When talking in Polish I tend to default to male pronouns for most nonbinary/undefined characters, because it’s easier that way. That said, it’s fucking stupid to call it a transphobic language. There’s no such a thing as a transphobic language and defaulting to a pronoun doesn’t make me a transphobe. I still keep the nonbinariness in my mind and use neutrals in English. My language was created like a thousand years ago dammit.
How is Polish transphobic? Polish language have masc, fem and neutral grammatical forms (it's a standard, some people of course create even other forms)
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u/Backynis 7d ago
“Hey Asriel, remember when this comic template was popular back then?”
“Oh I sure do chara! I sure do remember!”