Gender-neutral Pronoun - Uralic Languages

Uralic Languages

Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian belong to the Uralic languages family of languages (thus not Indo-European) languages. All pronouns are gender-neutral. The third-person singular and plural personal pronouns are hän and he in Finnish, tema (ta) and nemad (nad) in Estonian and ő and ők in Hungarian, respectively, which always refer to persons or animals.

In the last few decades the Finnish spoken language has also moved in this direction. The third-person singular and plural are, respectively, se and ne, which according to the written language specifications refer to an inanimate object or an animal. In informal spoken Finnish, se and ne are routinely used in reference to humans of either gender, animals, and inanimate objects or entities. The distinction between "hän" and "se" is retained in formal situations and in written Finnish except reported informal speech. Thus, at a time when English is moving towards gender-neutrality, Finnish is moving to species-neutrality.