Beyond the alphabet, beyond the binary, maybe beyond “Chinese”? Digital input constraints on gender-inclusive Chinese pronouns

The emergence of gender-inclusive pronouns in Chinese reveals how
globalised technological infrastructure for writing can create institutional barriers to orthographic innovation. Written Chinese has only distinguished gender in third-person pronouns for about a century, with 他 ‘he’, 她 ‘she’ and 它
‘it’ all pronounced as tā in Mandarin. Recently, several new Chinese genderinclusive pronouns have emerged. The emerging pronouns include a romanised
form based on pinyin (‘TA’), as well as Chinese character forms (Sinographs) encoding nonbinary gender (e.g., 「⿰无也」). In this study, I analyse data from two
large Chinese-language corpora to investigate the frequency and use of these
emerging gender-inclusive pronouns alongside binary pronouns 他 ‘he’ and 她
‘she’. Results of the corpus analysis highlight how institutional technical requirements—particularly Unicode encoding standards and input method compatibility—shape which linguistic innovations can succeed. Proposed Sinograph pronouns remain virtually absent from mainstream discourse, as they cannot be typed using standard input systems. Meanwhile, ‘TA’ is increasingly accepted in mainstream discourse, with its utility as a gender-neutral pronoun facilitating its
emergence as a gender-inclusive form. These findings reveal how the parameters
of digital writing can constrain language change through requirements for global
standardisation that neither local solutions nor social acceptance alone can overcome. While the introduction of the feminine pronoun 她 ‘she’ in the 1920s required navigation of social and practical linguistic constraints in China, contemporary Chinese pronoun innovation must also work within the parameters
of global technological infrastructure governing Sinograph creation. This study
thus illuminates broader questions about how globalised contemporary writing
technologies shape the possibilities for script reform and innovation.