Is gender likely to disappear altogther from English?

I have just joined Facebook, and if you want someone to be a friend on the site, you 'poke' them. Well, I 'poked' one of my actual friends, and it said 'You have poked Jane (not real name), they will be notified'.

This got me thinking. While modern English does use 'they' to refer to the third person singular in certain instances, there are rules governing this. It is usually used with something like 'someone' or 'a person'. Of course, the computer could not recognise the gender of the person, but still if you mention a name, it doesn't really sound right to then follow it with 'they'. As such I would have expected it to read 'He/she will be notified'. The fact that it didn't seems like a bit of a new development to me, and made me think that there is a possibility that gender will disappear altogether from English, just as it doesn't exist at all in some other languages. Maybe we will eventually start saying things like 'I spoke to my friend John today, they were a bit fed up'.

What do you think?

This should be in the English section of Antimoon, isn't it ?

I already say things like that, and I hear other people use "they" to refer to a person of known gender all the time.

>>This should be in the English section of Antimoon, isn't it ?<<

No, I don' think so. The English section tends to be used more by people learning English, whereas this section is used more to discuss langauges in general, of which English is one. There are a lot of other topics related to English in this section.

And a small correction. You should have written 'This should be in the English section of Antimoon, SHOULDN"T it?' You would only use 'isn't' if the only verb in the sentence was 'is'.

To the person who wrote the initial post and started this thread:

I have been a member of Facebook for quite some time. Facebook only uses neutral gender pronouns when the person doesn't specificy their sex in their profile. Basically, it means that your friend "Jane" hasn't designated in her profile that she is a female. Facebook doesn't make any assumptions about anyone's sex.

Also, you can actually add a friend without poking them.

>>I have been a member of Facebook for quite some time. Facebook only uses neutral gender pronouns when the person doesn't specificy their sex in their profile. Basically, it means that your friend "Jane" hasn't designated in her profile that she is a female. Facebook doesn't make any assumptions about anyone's sex<<

Yes, I realise that, but I was pointing out that it would be more usual to follow it with 'he/she' as opposed to 'they'.

Sorry, maybe I should clarify. I don't mean Facebook should be able to tell the gender of the person and then state either 'he' or 'she', one or the other, I mean literally that it could say 'he/she', as it could be either. As I said English often allows 'they' when the gender isn't clear, but this doesn't normally happen when an actual name is mentioned. It sounds odd after that, and as such I kind of saw it as a further step towards eliminating gender from the English language.

This should be in the English section of Antimoon, shouldn't it ?

>>This should be in the English section of Antimoon, shouldn't it ?<<

Yes, that's the correct English, but no I don't see that it should be in the English section. This section is entitled 'Languages', and not 'Languages apart from English'. :)

Und noch was, falls du vermutest, dass ich eine Englischmuttersprachler sei, die keine andere Sprache könne und deshalb hier nicht beitragen sollte, bist du verkehrt.

Ich entschuldige mich, wenn meine Verwendung des Konjunktivs falsch ist!

Oui, ce sujet devrait être reversé dans la section monolingue.

>>Oui, ce sujet devrait être reversé dans la section monolingue.<<

What for? Your posts there never get redirected here.

T'as pas encore saisi la différence entre un sujet et un message ? Tu veux un définition ?

Don't cry. You still don't understand what it means to post in English in the English forum.

I think gender should be eliminated from the English language.

Our nouns, like languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Hunarian, Chinese, Turkish and Japanese, don't have grammatical gender.

Although, UNLIKE those languages, English retains NATURAL gender for pronouns (remember, there is NO grammatical gender in English. He/she/it are NATURALl genders.)

There is no need for gender in any language. Finnisn gets by with "han", which translated into English as the masculine/feminine/neuter "he/she/it."

English should get rid of them.