Is English the only neuter language?

Question

You know, is there another language that doesn't use he or she to describe its nouns?

Answer 1

This is true of many languages. For example, in Japanese and Chinese, nouns don't have gender, and they don't even have number (no plurals).

I think most European & Slavic languages have gender on their nouns. Among languages spoken in Europe, Finnish has no noun genders (probably Hungarian too) -- Finnish is from a completely different language family from other European languages.

Answer 2

There is no such term as 'neuter language' or 'neutral'. Rather English is one of many languages that have no grammatical gender. Well, almost, it seems to have traces like the habit of using 'she' to refer to ships and such. Anyway, there are lots of languages that have no gender distinctions at all, like Persian and Turkish and Japanese and Hungarian and Finnish and so on, but English is quite different because it does distinguish 'he' from 'she', but usually based on natural gender (sex) rather than grammatical gender. In this regard I think it is rather uncommon. Actually at the moment I cannot think of another such language, though I am sure one exists.

Answer 3

The word you want is "neutral", not "neuter".
Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and a lot of other Asian languages don't. English used to be gender specific like other European languages, but later on the sounds infused and to simplify the language, the genders got disposed of.

Answer 4

Farsi (Persian) and all of its descendants (Dari, Urdu, Pashtu, etc.), just like english are gender-neutral. Those languages are spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of India.

Answer 5

German uses 'es'

French uses 'on' but it's not exactly for describing.

Russian has the neuter 'Оно' and has neuter adjectives too.

these all are similar to the English 'it.'

English isn't the only one, there are quite a few!

Hope I could help,

-Aртур

Answer 6

No. Japanese doesn't do this either.