Missy Sturtevant had a very good question in Questionland earlier this week: "What do genderqueer folks do with languages like Spanish, German, etc. that use gender in adjectives and pronouns?"

Turns out holmgren is some kind of word expert or something—just look at this answer full of information that kind of makes my head spin:

In similar fashion to ze/zie/sie and zir/hir in English, the Dutch queer community uses "zhij", a cross of zij (she) and hij (he), and "zhaar", a cross of haar (her) and hem (him).

The poor German language is truly encased, and I mean that literally. Every word in a sentence reflects and is dependent on the case, number, and grammatical gender of the subject — and there are three: feminine, masculine, and neuter. Perceived gender identity doesn't necessarily correspond to grammatical gender (e.g. "Mädchen", German for "girl", is neuter not feminine because of the diminutive "-chen" suffix, effectively meaning that all little girls are referred to as "it".) There is no movement in the queer community that I'm aware of to use a non-gendered pronoun whether existing or created. Right now German is still fighting for more common use of inclusive nouns — like firefighter instead of fireman/firewoman or flight attendant instead of steward/stewardess. But it's a challenge; the structure of the language doesn't make it easy.

Along with Finnish, Hungarian has no grammatical gender. The pronouns are all genderless. It is impossible to decipher gender through grammar alone; one must enquire as to the subject's gender or gender identity.

As for Mandarin Chinese, when speaking the third person pronoun "ta" sounds exactly the same for he/she/it or (when combined with the pluralizing character) they. In modern writing, however, the characters are different and do in fact express gender with either a "man" radical/prefix-character or a "woman" radical/prefix-character or an "animal" radical/prefix-character.. or something else.

Whoa, right? Or maybe I'm just impressed because I can only remember exactly four words from two years worth of German and half of them are curse words. Anyway, holmgren's answer is this week's Answer of the Week! Both holmgren and Missy will receive a $25 gift card for Pagliacci Pizza.

Need some answers of your own? Remember that there are some really, really smart people in Questionland!