Tell me your pronouns, and I’ll tell you who you are. That seems to be the present state in English, where these little words have become much more than just grammatical stand-ins for person nouns. Whether you identify as “he,” “she” or “they” — or prefer not to identify at all — seems as much a political choice as it is a linguistic one.

But what about pronouns — 代名詞 (daimeishi) — in Japanese?

One important thing to note is that, in terms of frequency, 代名詞 are used far less often than in English. That’s because Japanese allows for sentences without overt subjects. As a result, you can talk about someone for a considerable amount of time without giving away their gender. In English, that would be all but impossible since the odd “he” or “she” would be hard to avoid. After all, that’s one of the reasons English developed the use of the singular “they” in the first place.

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