Esperanto
Gender-neutrality

Esperanto is sometimes accused of being inherently sexist, because the default form of some nouns is used for descriptions of men while a derived form is used for the women. This is said to retain traces of the male-dominated society of late 19th-century Europe of which Esperanto is a product. These nouns are primarily titles, such as baron/baroness, and kinship terms, such as sinjoro "Mr, sir" vs. sinjorino "Ms, lady" and patro "father" vs. patrino "mother". Before the movement toward equal rights for women, this also applied to professional roles assumed to be predominantly male, such as doktoro, a holder of a doctorate (male or unspecified), versus doktorino, a female doctorate-holder. This paralleled the contemporary situation with the English suffix -ess, as in the words waiter/waitress, actor/actress, etc.

On the other hand, the pronoun ĝi ("it") may be used generically to mean he/she/they; the pronoun li ("he") is always masculine and ŝi ("she") is always female, despite some authors' arguments. A gender-neutral singular pronoun ri has gradually become more widely used in recent years, although it is minority usage. The plural pronoun ili ("they") is always neutral, while nouns with the prefix ge– specifically includes both sexes, for example gesinjoroj (equivalent, depending on context, to either sinjoro kaj sinjorino "Mr. and Ms." or sinjoroj kaj sinjorinoj "Ladies and Gentlemen"), gepatroj "parents" (equivalent to patro kaj patrino "mother and father").
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