The harms and benefits of generalising in queer linguistics: analysing variation in non-binary pronouns in Dutch
Hielke Vriesendorp (Universiteit Utrecht)
Because of the stereotypes and harmful generalisations queer people face, making large decontextualised claims about their linguistic behaviour can carry serious risks: those claims may be read or used in discriminatory ways or may simply be inaccurate to the range of queer identities and practices. Because of this, most work in queer linguistics has sought to analyse language use in highly contextualised case studies with explicitly limited generalisability (Jones, 2021). This leaves a gap in knowledge on what linguistic behaviours are in fact common.
The current paper maps the usage of third person singular pronouns to refer to non-binary referents in Dutch, through a survey of inclusivity-oriented speakers of Dutch (N=656). Participants performed a cloze task embedded in a Dutch story about non-binary singer Sam Smith (who uses they/them in English) and to rate their own comfort with a range of personal pronouns. The data showed that the forms die, diens, hen, and hun are dominant and seem to form an emerging standard, which is also generally perceptually approved of by non-binary participants (N=171). These findings, whilst they do not exhaustively cover data points and queer perspectives, may be used to reduce harm to non-binary individuals (e.g. as a resource for new users of non-binary pronouns, which may reduce how often non-binary individuals are misgendered).
At the same time, this macro perspective carries the risk of implying homogeneity. In the current paper I employ two strategies to mitigate the potential harm. First, reporting on non-dominant data points and the plurality of perspectives may prevent erasure and essentialism. At a micro level, the production data from the current study included referential strategies beyond die/diens/hen/hun (e.g. name repetition and some neologisms). Furthermore, there were some non-binary participants who negatively evaluated some of these dominant forms, and many (26%) did not explicitly mention the dominant forms as their own pronouns.
Second, including ‘meso’ factors in the sociolinguistic analysis shifted the focus from essentialising static social categories to more interactionally relevant social factors. It was found that spending more time in cisgender-heterosexual social settings predicted the use of hen/hun over die/diens, as did knowing Sam Smith prior to the study. This helped contextualise other macrosocial factors which also predicted more use of hen/hun (greater age and straight or queer sexuality): the grammatically more salient forms hen and hun were more likely in participants to whom the referent’s non-binary identity was also more salient – either due to particularly high familiarity with non-binary identities (knowing Sam Smith and having the sexuality ‘queer’) or relatively low familiarity (older or straight participants and those often in cisgender heterosexual circles).
The paper thus argues that generalisations in queer linguistics can benefit marginalised speakers, but that those generalisations should and can be mitigated by simultaneously presenting non-dominant perspectives and data points and connecting the found generalisations to interactionally relevant social factors, rather than an essentialist, static notion of gender or sexual identity categories.
Reference
Jones, L. (2021). Queer linguistics and identity: The past decade. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 10(1), 13-24.