Gender-neutral pronouns in Spanish, French and other languages

The gender-neutral pronoun used in Spanish is elle (plural elles), usually paired with words ending in -e, such as todes instead of todos or todas. It is community usage rather than standard Spanish, and the Real Academia Española rejects it. The same pattern runs through the other languages on this site: French iel, German dey and xier, the Italian schwa, Polish neuter forms and Brazilian Portuguese elu are carried by community use rather than by dictionaries, and have met resistance from language academies or governments. Here is how each works and where it stood in September 2026, language by language, without ranking them.

Why a pronoun is only the start

In English, gender mostly lives in he and she, so a neutral pronoun fixes most sentences on its own. In the six other languages here, gender also runs through articles, adjectives, participles and many nouns, and in Polish through past-tense verbs, including when you talk about yourself. A neutral pronoun is only the first decision; the rest of the sentence needs one too.

That is why non-binary people in these languages combine strategies: a new pronoun, new endings, rewording to avoid gender altogether, or simply the person's name. And plenty use the masculine or the feminine. Florence Ashley, writing about French, and the Italian blog Progetto Genderqueer make the same point: neutral forms are an option, not an obligation, and many non-binary people prefer a gendered form, or use one as a second choice. The Polish figures below bear that out.

So the practical rule is the one on our pronouns guide, applied once per language: ask, and do not assume that someone's English pronouns tell you how they want to be referred to in Spanish or Polish. If a match gets it wrong, what to do when a match misgenders you covers the next step.

English: singular they, and neopronouns

English already had a word for the job. The linguist Dennis Baron traces the earliest recorded gender-neutral use of they to the 14th century, and writers including Shakespeare used it for one person. The debate came back, Baron says, with growing awareness of non-binary and trans people. The AP Stylebook, used by many newsrooms, accepted they in 2017 for people who do not identify as he or she, and Merriam-Webster added singular they to its online dictionary in September 2019, then made they its word of the year, based on lookups. It takes a plural verb, they are, as our they/them page explains.

Beside they sit neopronouns such as xe/xem and ze/zir, and the idea is older than it looks: Baron has collected more than 200 coined English pronouns, the earliest from 1841. In the 2025 Gender Census, a yearly online survey of people whose gender does not fit the binary, 75.0% of 43,096 respondents chose they and 8.8% chose xe/xem. The census is run by a volunteer and promoted on social media, and three in four participants were 30 or younger, so read it as a snapshot of one crowd. If a set keeps catching on your tongue, practise it out loud.

French: iel, and the point médian

Iel, a blend of il and elle, is by far the most used neutral pronoun in French and is generally presented as the consensus form, according to French Wikipedia. It is also spelt yel or ielle, the plural is iels, and rarer alternatives such as ille, ul and ael exist. Agreement is the harder part. In writing, a common solution is the point médian, a raised dot that combines endings, as in iel est content·e. Florence Ashley's 2019 overview of non-binary French notes that such spellings are hard to read aloud, and that several non-binary people prefer the masculine or the feminine for themselves.

Officially, iel and inclusive writing are contested at almost every level. The dictionary Le Robert added it to its online edition in October 2021, labelled rare, and the education minister of the time, Jean-Michel Blanquer, criticised the decision. The Académie française had declared unanimously in October 2017 that inclusive writing put the French language in mortal danger. A ministerial circular of May 2021 bars the point médian in teaching, and France's Conseil d'État ruled that circular lawful in December 2024. In October 2023 the Senate passed a bill against inclusive writing that also targets iel; the Assemblée nationale's file shows it sent to committee, most recently in July 2024, with no vote since. In Quebec, the Office québécois de la langue française says iel remains specific to gender-diverse communities, does not advise using it, and recommends epicene wording, which avoids marking gender at all.

German: dey, xier and the gender star

German has no single neutral pronoun; several compete. Xier (xier, xieser, xiem), pronounced like ksier so that it rhymes with Tier, belongs to a set of genderless pronouns developed by Illi Anna Heger and has been in use since 2012, according to the non-binary community wiki nibi.space. Dey began as an anonymous question on a German non-binary Tumblr blog and, the same wiki says, has appeared since 2020 in books, articles, video games and series. En was proposed at an Austrian LGBTIQA+ congress in St. Pölten in 2018, blending er, es and the Swedish neutral pronoun hen. The first name often stands in for a pronoun, especially for people who use none, or when someone's pronoun is not known.

For nouns, the familiar tool is the Gendersternchen, the gender star (Lehrer*innen), or the colon (Schüler:innen). Both are meant to signal every gender, not only men and women, although they are built from the masculine and feminine forms. The Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, the council behind the official German spelling rules, said in July 2023 that these signs are not part of the core of German spelling and can cause grammatical problems it has not resolved, such as der*die Präsident*in, and that it will keep watching how they are used. Bavaria has gone further: in March 2024 its cabinet explicitly banned the star, the colon and similar signs in its schools, universities and public authorities.

Spanish: elle and the -e ending

Elle (plural elles) is a non-normative pronoun, used mostly within sexual and gender diversity groups and by younger people, according to Spanish Wikipedia. It comes with -e endings on nouns and adjectives: todes, chiques. The same article notes that the -e ending was proposed at least as early as 1976 and spread decades later as a pronounceable alternative to the x and the at sign (todxs, tod@s), which have no spoken equivalent; elle grew out of it. A 2020 guide from Argentina's Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity noted that writing with the x has been called linguistic disobedience, and said the -e had been gaining strong acceptance because it moves easily from writing to speech, while noting the criticism that it erases the -a that makes women visible.

The Real Academia Española has said no. In October 2020 it added elle to its Observatorio de palabras, a list of words that are not in the dictionary but that people ask about, and removed it three days later, citing the confusion it had caused. In December 2020 it said that the -e as a gender mark is foreign to Spanish morphology and unnecessary, because the grammatical masculine already covers everyone. In Argentina, the national government announced in February 2024 that the e, the at sign and the x would no longer be allowed anywhere in the national public administration.

Italian: the schwa and the -u

The best-known Italian proposal is the schwa: ǝ in the singular and a long schwa, ɜ, in the plural, so maestro and maestra become maestrǝ, and a mixed group becomes maestrɜ. It comes from Luca Boschetto, who first set it out online in 2015 and runs the site Italiano Inclusivo, which also proposes the article lǝ and the pronoun lǝi in place of lui and lei. The linguist Vera Gheno mentioned it in her 2019 book Femminili singolari and has written about it since. Italian Wikipedia says the schwa seems to be the most popular solution at the moment, and the -u (tuttu) the most practical to say aloud; the asterisk, the x and the at sign turn up in writing.

For the pronoun itself, some people translate they as loro. The Italian non-binary blog Progetto Genderqueer notes that some non-binary people dislike being called loro, and that many prefer the masculine or the feminine with neutral forms as a second choice, or the other way round. Using the person's name sidesteps the question.

Official Italy has pushed back. The Accademia della Crusca, in a formal opinion reported in March 2023 for the equal opportunities committee of the Corte di Cassazione, ruled out the asterisk and the schwa in legal writing. In March 2025 the education ministry told schools not to use either in official communications, saying they conflict with the rules of the language.

Polish: ono, onu and the dukaizmy

Polish makes the choice visible every time you talk about yourself, because past-tense verbs carry gender in the first person: byłem zmęczony (I was tired, masculine), byłam zmęczona (feminine). The community site zaimki.pl catalogues the alternatives. The neuter, ono/jego (byłom zmęczone), already exists in the grammar: zaimki.pl reports that the Rada Języka Polskiego, the Polish Language Council, judged forms such as byłom grammatically correct in 2003, and notes that they appear in grammars from 1796 and 1823. Onu/jenu (byłum), known as dukaizmy, were created by the novelist Jacek Dukaj for posthuman beings without a defined sex in his 2004 novel Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość.

zaimki.pl's 2025 census of non-binary people, with 1,584 respondents of an average age of 24 who could pick several answers, shows how mixed real use is. Asked which forms they use when speaking, 60.7% chose the masculine, 52.3% the neuter, 45.5% the feminine, 14% the masculine plural and 8.6% dukaizmy, and 55.9% said they avoid gendered forms by rephrasing. Most respondents also preferred the name rodzaj neutralny, neutral gender, to the usual rodzaj nijaki, which zaimki.pl avoids because of its negative connotations.

The Polish Language Council's recent opinion on job advertisements shows where the official line sits. It recommends pairs of masculine and feminine forms or the word osoba (person), notes that Polish law recognises only two sexes but that osoba may also meet non-binary people's expectations, and says that community forms such as osoba studencka (student person) cannot yet count as standard public language.

Brazilian Portuguese: elu and the -e ending

In Brazil, neutral language (linguagem neutra) changes the words themselves. The Manual de Linguagem Neutra em Língua Portuguesa, released in 2022 by the Frente Trans Unileira at the Federal University for Latin American Integration (UNILA) with Gioni Caê, sets out several systems. The elu system (elu, delu, nelu, aquelu) is, it says, perhaps the most practical and the most used, because it works in both speech and writing; others include ile, ilu, from which elu grew, and el. Nouns and adjectives take -e (amigue), and um or uma becomes ume. The manual advises against the x and the at sign (amigxs, amig@s), which cannot be pronounced and which screen-reading software does not recognise. It also separates neutral language from inclusive language (linguagem inclusiva), which rewords instead, for example with aquela pessoa, that person.

Brazilian politics has moved faster than grammar. States and cities passed bans on neutral language in schools, and the Supreme Federal Court has struck them down on the ground that only the federal level, the União, can legislate on the language: unanimously for Rondônia's state law in February 2023, then for Porto Alegre, Muriaé and São Gonçalo in April 2025, and for Águas Lindas de Goiás and Ibirité in a ruling announced in March 2026. Meanwhile, the federal level has legislated: in November 2025 President Lula signed a national plain language law that bars new forms of gender and number inflection in official documents and events, at every level of government, according to the news site Diadorim.