Another sinograph for Unicode — the third-person gender-neutral pronoun
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No sooner had I posted about a block of 11,328 proposed Small Seal characters dating back roughly two millennia being incorporated in UNICODE than a single spanking new sinograph surfaced and was urgently put forward for inclusion, and it is causing a bit of a ruckus. That is the third-person gender-neutral pronoun [X也], which is pronounced the same as all the other characters for supposedly gendered Sinitic third-person pronouns, viz., tā (see below for their graphic forms).
N.B.: The proposed neograph under dicussion is provisionally being written as [X也], but bear in mind that, as I have pointed out countless times, all sinographs, by the exigencies / inherent nature of the script, whether they have 1 stroke or 64 / n strokes, must be squeezed inside the same size box as all other sinographs. In other words, [X也] perforce — once the typographers get it worked out — will eventually have to fit inside exactly the same space as 也 and biáng (you can get an authentic plate of these belt-like Shaanxi noodles at Xi'an Sizzling Woks, 40th & Chestnut in University City next to Penn [opens at 11:30 AM, closed on Tuesdays]). There are many Language Log posts about diverse aspects of this jabberwockyish character. Just look it up under "biang"
The default character for the third-person pronoun was 他 (colloquial usage that emerged beginning around the 3rd century AD). In and of itself, 他 (and the morpheme / lexeme it is supposed to signify) is not gendered. It is just semantophore 亻("human") + phonophore 也 (Old Sinitic *laːlʔ). By medieval times (around 600 AD), it had come to be pronounced roughly tha, and in the developing topolects after that, except for slight differences in tone and vowel quality, it was roughly the same. Though 他 was of extremely high frequency, tenth among all the tens of thousands of extant sinographs, people simply used it naturally as a makeshift for all spoken third-person pronouns. They didn't pay much / any attention to the gender of the third-person being referenced — until inflected languages and Western discourse began to exert a significant influence in the Sinosphere.
The other gendered third-person pronouns — 她 ("she"), 它 ("it"), 牠 (animal), 祂 (god / sprit / deity) — were all pronounced the same as 他 ("he") — grammatically had the same usage.
X也 reminds me of LatinX, although the big controversy surrounding the latter is how to pronounce the final letter, whereas the chief controversy over X也 is the unseemly appearance of having an alphabetical letter wedded to a sinograph ("doesn't look right"). Furthermore, in X也, the X has no phonetic function. It exists only to indicate that this character does not indicate a male, female, neuter, animal, or spiritual being. It denotes unadulterated transness.
When the trans community in the Sinosphere became sufficiently exercised over their linguistic identity, they started to use "TA" for the third-person gender-neutral pronoun. That worked on an ad hoc, informal basis for a number of years, but then some people grew discontented over having an alphabetical word embedded at the heart of the language. Never mind that, as Mark Hansell, Liu Yongquan, and others have shown unmistakably, the Roman alphabet has already become an indissoluble part of the Chinese writing system (cf. Rōmaji in the Japanese writing system).
Well, X也 has already been accepted into Unicode and has been given a codepoint, but it has yet to be determined how it will be input into digital devices.
In conclusion, X也 is the non-binary, generic third-person pronoun, and it is pronounced the same as 他 ("he"), 她 ("she"), 它 ("it"), 牠 (animal), 祂 (god / sprit / deity); to wit, as the renowned Chinese linguist Y.R. Chao would have it, X也 is "unsayable" in such a way that it conveys the semantics it is designed to convey.
Selected readings
- "Seal Script in Unicode" (1/15/26)
- "The Englishization of Chinese enters a new phase" (8/8/24)
- "Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2" (3/5/13)
- "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)
- Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese" (8/30/12)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 3" (11/25/18) — includes a very long (but not complete) list of previous Language Log posts on Romanization, Englishization, digraphia and diglossia, biscriptalism and multiscriptalism, bilingualism and multilingualism
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 4" (12/15/18) — it's really happening, believe you me
- "Official digraphia" (9/13/18) — no, it's already happened; with long list of pertinent readings
- "The actuality of emerging digraphia" (3/10/19)
- "Language is not script and script is not language" (1/23/22)
- "Language is not script and script is not language, part 2" (7/10/22)
- "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
- "Language vs. script" (11/21/16)
- "Grids galore" (11/19/23)
See other posts under "Archive for Diglossia and digraphia".
[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]
Jim said,
January 17, 2026 @ 5:12 pm
I wonder if the X part of glyph will stay more Latin-style, or end up being drawn more like existing characters that have a similar-looking components, like the top of 希.
Jenny Chu said,
January 17, 2026 @ 5:59 pm
I'm quite certain it will end up looking like the X type thing inside 区.
KIRINPUTRA said,
January 18, 2026 @ 5:34 am
Wow, that graph makes no sense. Clearly their logic is that 亻 is gendered male, while 女 is female, so a third option is desired. But 亻 is 人 is HUMAN. Why not de-gender it, to the extent that it's even gendered at all?
This kind of mass failure at logic — and unwillingness to delay gratification — is at the heart of what got China in trouble in the 1800s and 1900s.
To add, where there are gendered vs non-gendered options in the script, the modern Chinese powers-that-be always fetishistically spring for the gendered option, e.g. 娼 vs 倡.
Peter Cyrus said,
January 18, 2026 @ 5:53 am
Everyone notes the uniqueness of the glyph for biáng, but isn't the reading also unique? Is there another word pronounced biáng?
JMGN said,
January 18, 2026 @ 8:26 am
@Cyrus
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bi%C3%A1ng
Victor Mair said,
January 18, 2026 @ 8:39 am
Biáng is not a legitimate, standard syllable in Putonghua (Standard Mandarin) phonology, although it is a real-world, widely recognized word used in regional dialect.
Here is the breakdown based on linguistic and usage facts:
Phonological Rule Violator: The syllable biang violates the standard rules of Mandarin pronunciation (phonotactics). In Standard Mandarin, the consonant b (a labial) cannot be followed by the sound combination -iang. This is why similar sounding, non-standard syllables like piang, miang, or fiang also do not exist.
Origin as Onomatopoeia: The word is derived from the Shaanxi dialect (specifically Xi'an) and is onomatopoeic, intended to mimic the sound of dough being slapped against a wooden table during the making of "biangbiang noodles".
Dictionary and Input Absence: The character is notoriously complex—having over 50 strokes—and is not found in standard Mandarin dictionaries. It is often absent from standard computer/phone character input systems, though it has been added to Unicode in recent years.
Modern Usage Status: While it is not a "legitimate" syllable in the strict academic sense of Standard Mandarin, it is recognized as a legitimate, specialized, regional term that has gained national popularity through culinary culture.
In summary, biáng is a popular, culturally significant regional sound that does not follow the standard, formal phonetic rules of Putonghua. (AIO)
David Marjanović said,
January 18, 2026 @ 12:48 pm
In the proposal I saw, it already did. Clearly it was chosen because it looks like an x, but it was not the actual letter, it was the existing not-quite-radical.
wgj said,
January 18, 2026 @ 2:32 pm
@KIRINPUTRA: The "mass failure at logic" is quite universal and by no means unique to Chinese, since language is inherently social, and social movements are often illogical, especially when it's driven to a fever pitch.
Nouns in German used to be generally ungendered too – until their feminists decided that every role needs a female version with the -in ending. Now, they want equal representation in every offical text (like laws) in forms of double nouns (as in "jede Bügerin und jeder Bürger" instead of just "jeder Bürger", and this is before the third genders is considered), making every sentence suffocatingly redundant.
Proposals to instead re-de-gender the nouns, which would be the logical thing to do, is going nowhere – like the Chinese, German women (and people of third genders) don't want to be told by others how their linguistic representation should look like. They want to decide for themselves – logic be damned!
Some pragmatic people who want to keep the language sane but do not wish to be politically incorrect have invented the "female as the default gender" solution, writing entire texts using female version of every noun. Even more bizarre is the further development of this solution to randomize every instance of a noun to use either gender, making the whole text is a patchwork of random genders …
T said,
January 18, 2026 @ 4:07 pm
Will the PRC block this character?
Coby said,
January 18, 2026 @ 6:25 pm
@wgj: How can German nouns be ungendered or de-gendered if adjectives and articles are necessarily gendered?
Peter Cyrus said,
January 19, 2026 @ 5:08 am
"The syllable biang violates the standard rules of Mandarin pronunciation (phonotactics). In Standard Mandarin, the consonant b (a labial) cannot be followed by the sound combination -iang. This is why similar sounding, non-standard syllables like piang, miang, or fiang also do not exist."
True, but why? The -iang final resembles the -ü series in its distribution, as does -ia (except for dia), but -ian -iao -ing -in are all attested after labials. Any explanation?
wgj said,
January 19, 2026 @ 10:15 am
Only characters on the "whitelist" – which is published through the New China Dictionary 新华字典 – are officially permitted, so a new character is automatically blocked by not adding it to this official dictionary. Note that even the spiritual third person pronoun 祂 is not included in this "whitelist" (or this dictionary) even though it has been in use (by a small minority of Chinese) for over a century now.
Janet said,
January 20, 2026 @ 3:10 am
It’s exciting to see this development in Unicode 17.0, 10 years after 㐅也 was created by intersex community group 雙性人The Missing Gender 0.972.
In 2023, I surveyed nearly 100 queer Chinese speakers on their pronoun preferences and use. I found the broadest support for TA, with many liking the idea of a gender-inclusive character pronoun like 㐅也 or 无也 but pessimistic about the practical barriers. But maybe that’ll change soon! The respondents also gave their views on ungendered 他.
The peer-reviewed research is available here: https://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/3417
And discussed in The Conversation here: https://theconversation.com/chinese-only-introduced-a-feminine-pronoun-in-the-1920s-now-it-might-adopt-a-gender-inclusive-one-221013
Awelotta said,
January 20, 2026 @ 7:02 pm
In light of the discussion of gender-inclusive language in German, the paper "Graphemic Methods for Gender-Neutral Writing" (Yannis Haralambous, Joseph Dichy) (https://hal.science/hal-02383616/) provides a nice overview of different strategies in a few European (Latin script) languages.
John Swindle said,
January 21, 2026 @ 7:02 am
You already have a basically non-gendered 他 from which the female, neutral, animal, and spiritual all lately diverged, leaving the original to usually represent males. All are still pronounced "tā" in Mandarin. Might it not be better to use the new X他 (tā) to represent males, where distinguishing them in such a way is felt necessary, and let 他 (tā) go back to meaning "he, she, or it"? And, by the way, isn't the Cantonese equivalent 佢 ("kui," or around here "ki") still non-gendered?
Chas Belov said,
January 23, 2026 @ 11:45 pm
@John Swindle: ¿Where is 佢 pronounced "ki"?
Calvin said,
January 29, 2026 @ 9:54 pm
¿Where is 佢 pronounced "ki"?
Taishanese (台山话), a Yue dialect spoken mainly in the "Four Counties" region.
Chas Belov said,
January 31, 2026 @ 9:52 pm
Thank you.