Shorth

Languages

English is one of those languages, in which you do not have to specify whether you are male or female. You can write, for example: I am a doctor. Do your readers know if you are a man or a woman? No. In many other languages, there are many different ways to specify what gender you are. There is no universal “I am”. There is either male “I am” or female “I am”. If you have been speaking English since your birth, and if this is your first language, you might not really feel how it could be possible to distinguish whether a person is male or female if he/she is writing about himself/herself in the first person, but in many other languages there is no way to hide it. I am sure that many people abuse it to hide their gender, especially if they chat on the internet with friends that they have never met, or participate in social networking. If Hebrew, for example, was the most spoken language in the world, there would be no issues like that. However, with more and more people speaking English worldwide, the tendency which aims at not specifying your gender is growing very rapidly. Of course, there are also some benefits of not having to specify what gender you are. This way you may be protected in a way from predators which are surfing the Internet to find a victim.