Most European languages have no equivalent, since everything is gendered, not just pronouns. Efforts to embed equality in those languages go the other way - adding female gendered terms for male-dominated professions and vice-verse, as opposed to removing gender which is just too hard.

Russian in particular is spoken in places where they're hostile to the whole idea. They have a neuter gender, and you might see it used in a mocking "it" kind of way for queer people of all kinds.

For languages outside the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic families it's usually a moot issue; 3/4 have no grammatical gender features at all.

Unfortunately in Portuguese there is still no widely adopted gender neutral pronoun. Heck, as far as I know, we still can't agree on what the best solution is due to the way gendered pronouns are tied to all the grammar.

But some solutions I've seen include:

• Using @ or other symbols in place of a/e. Ele/Ela > El@
• Using U in place of e/a. Ele/Ela > Elu
• Modify the male pronoun (which is the default for mixed gender groups of nouns) to have an accent, kind of in line with the Spanish Elle. Ele > Éle

By contrast, Japanese, which I also speak, has no need to use gendered pronouns (usually you just use the person's name) so it's really easy to live by. Even if you need to use a pronoun, there are many ways to make a gender neutral one, eg あの人 (lit. That person).

Honestly, it is not working in Spanish. I know some contexts where this is used, but as a gendered language it is quite complicated. While "Elle" is used for "them" in limited contexts like very inclusive universities, it's not quite expected except maybe in the lgbtq+ community.

Most nouns end with an "a" for the female gender, so the proposed solution is to exchange the "a" for an "e", but there's a good amount of not gendered nouns and there exist already lots of exceptions to general rules. "Student" and "person" are two good examples of very important words with problems. "Student" is "estudiante" is Spanish, which ends commonly with an "e", so it's not gendered, you can call someone "el estudiante" (male) or "la estudiante" (female), the proposed "le estudiante" (singular) and "les estudiantes" (plural) sound good enough to me. Now, "person" is "persona" in Spanish, and it sounds gendered because it ends with an "a", nevertheless, it's actually neutral for any gender, but it's usually accompanied by the article "la" which is used for female nouns, so, it's "la persona" regardless of the genre of the person in question. This is also pushed in authorities, which used to be titled as nouns like "presidente" which is "president" and arguably gender neutral, except it is used for males and important women, like the president of Mexico, demand to be called "presidenta". Most authorities, though, are going for the "persona presidenta" form, regardless of gender, to refer to the people in charge.

So, yeah, it's been rather unpractical in Spanish.

In Finnish we don't have gendered pronouns, everyone is a they. But in spoken Finnish, we usually just refer to everyone as "it", and I think that's beautiful.

Jie/Jos = they Male/female Juos/Juos = them as in I see them. Same thing for male and female genders.

In Turkish it's all O. We do not have gendered pronouns, a singular third person is "o", plural third person is "onlar".

every version in polish sounds either artificial, dehumanising, or silesian

English and Swedish are common examples of where gender neutral pronouns have developed that sometimes meet ideological opposition from conservative thinkers but otherwise work largely fine in common parlance. They don't make a lot of people look up and wonder what was said. They and hon don't cause a fuzz because they are established to a sufficient degree. Now imagine that wasn't the case and in English we wanted to land on "shup" as a pronoun. I talked with Billy and shup didn't want to go fishing. You hear that and you're almost taken out of the conversation because it doesn't feel natural-in-the-language. Language being a cultural construct. (Don't misconstrue me here as saying members of the LGBTQ+ are not natural. Because they are perfectly natural.)

German is not only a three-gender grammatical clusterfuck but also a language where different neo-pronouns (similar to "shup" which I invented just to make this point) exist, none of them feeling as natural-in-the-language when in use, and none of them getting majority support from the relevant LGBTQ+ community. So the general suggestion is to use the name when known or to ask for the pronouns when required. In my very limited experience, German speakers who don't want to risk mis-pronouning people will sooner adapt their speech to avoid any use of third-person singular pronouns than to use "dey" or "sier." Which in itself might be an indication of where this road is going. German has a larger gap than English between societal progress and understanding and having that reflected in the language. German has embarked on a journey to get rid of a masculine-as-default mode since the 70s just to include the other majority gender in speech and visibility. And more than 50 years later the conventions around that are still subject to change and adherence to those still piss off conservative thinkers. So that gives you an idea of a timeframe until gender-neutral language can cement itself in the German language.

Another language that may have an easier time with gender-neutral speech is Japanese. People are more used to using the name of the person as a stand-in where an indoeuropean tongue screams for a pronoun. And most nouns that are titles to give to people, such as a professions, are never gender-neutral by default.

Basque language has no gendered pronouns.

Portuguese^[Ele = he; Ela = she; Add an 's' to the end and both become plural while keeping it gendered. Under normal circumstances, "eles" is used for ambiguous gender plural] doesn't have that. People will use a variety of alternatives, like elu/eli/el@/elx, which frankly sound super dumb. It doesn't help that almost everything in the language is gendered.

"Ő". Everyone is "ő" in Hungarian, we don't have gendered pronouns.

they/them user here! in my lwmguage, its they/them (im english.) hope this helps!

Swedish isn't exactly "my language", but it is the language I know best after English. Plural they is de and singular they is hen (to contrast with hon for she and han for he). It's been in use for decades, but only got officially added in the 2010s.

And Finnish just uses hän for everyone, which is supreme.

Tagalog: siya. 3rd person singular.

Nandito siya. He is here. She is here. They are here.

My language Persian doesn't have gendered pronouns at all

In German there is nothing established. The most common one I have heard which is still unknown by most is "en/en" (not sure if written correctly).

In French we have "iel". It's a mix of the male and female pronoms "il" and "elle".

Instead of having different words for plural of pronouns, in Chinese we append a character after single pronouns to make them plural.

• 我 (me) -> 我們 (us)
• 你 (you) -> 你們 (you all)
• 他 (him) -> 他們 (them (male))
• 她 (her) -> 她們 (them (female))

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.

There’s no real consensus on it yet in Dutch, but the most common are either hen/hun or die/diens. Both are known words that can be repurposed, but both have some disadvantages when it comes to certain grammatical rules.
There’s also some initiatives on new words, but they haven’t really gotten much traction yet.

There’s a rather lengthy article here in Dutch that explains it in depth:
https://taaladvies.net/taal-en-gender-verwijswoorden-voor-vrouwen-mannen-en-non-binaire-personen-algemeen/

The language I know best besides English is Spanish, but since it's not my culture, I decided to look it up, and there's actually an interesting Wikipedia article about gender neutrality in Spanish.

There's a separate page for a proposed single nonbinary pronoun "Elle" (pronounced A-yay) which I really like.

Swahili has 10 different "genders," called "noun classes" or "ngeli," and none of them correlate with sex. Instead, the third-person singular pronouns are:

• he/she and him/her: yeye
• his/her: wake

I don't think Croatian has it, and it is very gendered language. But some ideas

3rd person singular "ono" is literally translated "it" in English might work, but it feels dehumanizing when referred to one specific person, at least to me.

In my opinion what might work are 3rd person plural "oni" idk kinda hard when language is gendered.

In Italian it's not really used. There's an extremely fringe group of people who use singular pronouns "Io" (I) but plural adjectives and participles. "Io sono andati" instead of "Io sono andato" or "Io sono stanchi" instead of "Io sono stanco".

These are regarded as people who spend too much time on Tumblr and consume American media even within the most militant corners of the transfeminist movement, so it doesn't have much traction.

Most of the discourse is about gender-neutral language rather than pronouns.

To add to the confusion, Italian has no neutral gender, only male and female, but it retains neutral pronouns: esso/essi. The problem is that by ending in "o", most people think this is an alternative masculine pronoun and use it interchangeably with the masculine pronouns "egli" or "lui".

I'm not Chinese, but in Mandarin, he and she are both pronounced "ta" (first tone, flat intonation), even though they're written differently.

I'm not in all possible discourse-related spaces about Russian, but the surface level fight went around not pronouns, but nouns. Almost everything in Russian is gendered or inherits gender from the subject of the sentence, unlike English. So the questions liberals (non pejorative there) asked were about feminization of usually masculine-coded words describing most professions.

They/them would be они/их, and although I want to put it here and there and do so, it doesn't seem to work as smooth due to completely different gendering system.

Official norwegian: hen/hens

Countless unofficial ones