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What are the pronouns they/them in your language?
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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Asklemmy
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Instead of having different words for plural of pronouns, in Chinese we append a character after single pronouns to make them plural.
You get the idea. We also have pronouns for animals (牠), inanimate objects (它) and God (祂), and you can similarly add 們 to make them plural (except for god, I haven't seen the character being used in plural). Using they/them as pronoun for a person doesn't make sense in Chinese.
Chinese used to have no gender pronouns. Everyone is referred to as 他 (Mandarin) or 佢 (Cantonese). It's in last century when 她 ("she") is "invented", and no new gender pronouns in Cantonese. However, in terms of speaking, they are all pronounced the same way (ta1 in Mandarin, keoi5 in Cantonese), so it's literally impossible to use the wrong pronoun if you're speaking or typing in Cantonese.
Disclaimer: I'm learning Japanese & I don't know Chinese.
It looks like the original character for the 3rf person pronoun is now the masculine pronoun & the female pronoun is made by substituting the person component (人, I don't know how to type the left-component form) with the woman component (女).
他 isn't the pronoun for masculine third person. It's third person, period. Neutral gender if one has to ask.
Traditionally the character used to mean "that" is 彼. Apparently it's also gender-neutral.
That's exactly how to understand them
Does Chinese only have the one 1st person pronoun?
As far as I know, yes in modern Chinese. However if you include ancient Chinese there's also 吾