Most of Australia’s First Nations languages don’t have gendered pronouns. Here’s why
- Written by: Felicity Meakins, Professor of Linguistics, The University of Queensland
If you visit Broome in Western Australia, you might be lucky enough to see Mary G perform. Mary G is a popular Gija comedian. On her website, English is used to describe Mary G as she and Mary G’s alter ego, Mark Bin Bakar, as he. But if you listen to Broome locals speaking Kriol, Mary G is simply referred to by the gender-neutral Kriol pronoun im.
Gendered pronouns have become a contested part of language since we became more aware of the effects pronoun usage have on transgender and non-binary people. Different languages have different solutions. For example, it has become commonplace in English to extend the non-specific singular use of they to a specific use.
For most of Australia’s 460 First Nations languages, this issue does not exist. There is no gender distinction between third-person singular pronouns (she/he/it), except in a very few languages such as Murrinhpatha in the Northern Territory’s Daly River area.
Nyantu and similar sounding words are common pronouns used in many languages to cover she/he/it. Other First Languages use pronoun word endings, and many do not have a form for the third-person singular pronoun she/he/it. This means that not adding an ending to a word indicates she/he/it.
Other languages use that one to refer to she/he/it, again avoiding gender.
Mudburra, a language of the Elliott region in the NT, uses both pronoun endings and that one.
In the following example you can see the pronoun ending -li (“they”), but there is no form for it (i.e. “the fish”). We’ve added -Ø so you can see where the object pronoun would normally go. The word nyani (“that one”) is then used to refer to the speared fish.
Black Inc
A good example comes from another language of the Elliott region, Jingulu, the language of Jingili people. Jingulu has a gender system which affects nouns rather than pronouns.
Gender in Jingulu is not entirely unlike the Latin masculine, feminine and neuter system, in which every noun has one of three genders and has different endings to reflect this.
One difference between Latin and Jingulu is that Jingulu has an extra gender: vegetable. This four-way system is common in languages in northern Australia.
All nouns in Jingulu belong to one of four genders. Masculine words tend to end in -a or -ji, feminine words in -rni or -rdi, vegetable words in -mi or -bi, and neuter words in -u.
For some nouns, it is easy to predict which gender they belong to. Words for male humans and other animals are masculine, words for female humans and other animals are feminine, many words for edible plants are vegetable, while many words for other plants and inanimate objects are neuter.
A willy wagtail is believed to me a mythical man.
Douglas Cliff/Shutterstock
Similarly, the sun is a female deity and therefore takes the feminine article, whereas the moon is a male deity and is classified as masculine gender.
This is an edited extract from Bina: First Nations Languages, Old and New by Gari Tudor-Smith, Paul Williams and Felicity Meakins (Black Inc.)
Authors: Felicity Meakins, Professor of Linguistics, The University of Queensland 
