Gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun

Question

I’m writing a German locale for a project/game I’m developing, and some messages require a gender-neutral pronoun to refer to a person. For example, one of the messages is:

They were a detective.

Does German have a pronoun that fits these needs, or is it better to somehow avoid this requirement and phrase it differently? I did a bit of research, and found nothing even close to a definitive answer.

Edit: To provide more context to the example message, this particular one is displayed in a game on the ID tag of a corpse upon a player identifying a body, immediately after the announcement that they have discovered it (“X has found the body of Y’). So, it’s referring to the player to whom the body belonged, whose sex is unknown.

Answer 1

Gender-neutral, yes (the es). Gender-neutral in the sense of either female or male, no (unfortunately).

And even if there was one, the problem would survive in the nature of German nouns: In English, "detective" can be used for both genders, while in the German singular one must choose between Detektiv and Detektivin (inferring gender).

However, some still consider/perceive the male form as generic, allowing

Das war ein Detektiv.

to be used in the way you need.

This has become quite disputed, though, and the disputes ultimately lead to "Gendering" in the German language. That means modifying nouns in a way such that they cover both genders (but only if the nouns refer to a mixed group or an unknown individual). Some examples:

Das war ein/e DetektivIn. (the big I is called Binnen-I)
Er/sie war ein(e) Detektiv(in).
Liebe Detektivinnen und Detektive! (so even the plural infers gender)

Optically, this does not look very pretty, yet most public text sources have adopted (some form of) this style. So if the first example doesn't look all too horrid to you, then that's lucky, because I really can't think of some worthy periphrasis (it's difficult without "detective").

^{Of course it depends on your audience (and eventually on your superiors) whether you can use the generic masculine or not.
For a game, I believe that a colloquial "Er oder sie war ein Detektiv" would be OK, too, but as said, this is subject to change.}

Lastly, a natural solution would be to let the speaker assume a gender, which is then confirmed or refuted later on. This is often done in movies.

Answer 2

X has found the body of Y.
They were a detective.

In this particular case there may be an elegant gender-neutral translation, by not using a pronoun:

X hat die Leiche von Y gefunden.
Das Opfer war Detektiv.

Leiche (f.) ‘dead body’ and Opfer (n.) ‘victim’ don’t imply a certain sex. Alternatively, it also works with using the name of course.

Y war Detektiv.

Using Detektiv as a predicative without indefinite article ein may still be considered sexist by some feminists, but I’ve yet to see a psycholinguistic study to prove there’s a (male) bias in this particular construct. Evidence that there’s a bias in some constructs has frequently been (ab)used to justify critique of other constructs.

Neuter nouns like Opfer, Tier, Kind or Mädchen may always be referred to by masculine base forms of actor nouns (e.g. Detektiv), which they share most inflections with (“grammatical agreement”), but the derived feminine form (Detektivin) can also be used if the sex is known to be female (“natural agreement”) – the tendency to do so is growing.

Although Leiche is feminine, it would be (semantically) odd to refer to it with sie, because not the body but the person was a detective. Also, sie may be thought to refer to the name thereby determining the sex of Y.

X hat die Leiche von Y gefunden.
?Sie war Detektiv.

It would be less odd with Opfer.

X hat das Opfer gefunden.
Es war Detektiv.

Alas, a sentence starting with es war may easily be misunderstood to be using a filler es as in es war Sommer. The neuter relative pronoun may be better.

Dieses war Detektiv.

That’s still sounding unidiomatic, though, but with an adverbial or a full verb it becomes okayish.

Dieses war zu Lebzeiten Detektiv.
Dieses arbeitete als Detektiv.

An apposition could also be used instead. It may be introduced by a colon, en-dash or comma and it’s also possible to surround it by parentheses.

X hat die Leiche von Y gefunden – ein Detektiv.
X hat die Leiche von Y (Detektiv) gefunden.

Singular they

There is no direct equivalent to English singular they in German. Since sie is already used for both, (feminine) ‘she’ and (plural) ‘they’, there can’t be.

On the other hand, German es (or other neuter pronouns) can be used a bit more freely to refer to human beings than English it.

It’s a detective.
Es ist ein Detektiv.

PS: I’ve used Detektiv as a translation of ‘detective’, but that’s a false friend if the rank or role within the police force was meant.

Answer 3

Is this a game like Mafia or Werewolf where players eliminate each other?

In that case I'd go with "Er oder sie war Detektiv", or you could use tha player's name if you have that: "{Name} war Detektiv."

If gender is not important, you could avoid the problem by writing "Hier liegt ein Detektiv (oder eine Detektivin)".

You could also write "Das war ein Detektiv." but that could be misleading as it could be understood as "a detective killed that person". May depend on the context.

Answer 4

Disclaimer: I am not in any way a German speaker. I’ve only just started taking German classes, and it’s the second week of school.

In my most recent class, we started talking about pronouns and how every noun in the German language is gendered. As a Gender Studies major, I got very curious about gender-neutral pronouns that weren’t es, because it’s the equivalent of it in English, and as far as I know, nobody particularly liked being called it. I did some research and found the blogs of some genderqueer people who live in Germany. Many of them use the pronouns xier or sien instead of er/sie. Others use the plural Sie. For nouns, I found that there is one professor in Berlin who prefers to be referred to as Professx instead of Professor/Professorin. So you could use Detektix, or a variation of that.

Answer 5

What you are referring to is third person, not first person. The first person is 'I' or 'we' (German ich or wir). Also, what do you mean by 'requirement'?

Ahem

There is no such thing in German (if you are talking about persons), and not really in English. You would use er, just the same as English uses 'he'. Er in German encompasses persons of indeterminate sex just as 'he' does in English.

The 'gender-neutral' third person pronoun in English is 'it', which is used of inanimate objects, animals, and occasionally infants whose sex is not easily identifiable. German has es as a neuter third-person pronoun, but it is used to refer to grammatically neuter nouns, not 'inanimate things'. Since the gender of many German compound nouns is determined by the last component, you have the situation where Mädchen, which means 'girl', is not a feminine noun, but a neuter one because the suffix chen makes all nouns to which it is attached neuter. Das Mädchen, welches mich liebt, ist sehr schön. 'The girl who (or 'that') loves me is very beautiful'.

The German pronoun man, (not to be confused with der Mann, which means 'the man') which means 'one', is masculine (that means that masculine pronouns, such as sein, are used with it).

German declensions

It is used in situations where one would use a passive construction in English. Man glaubt = 'it is believed', man arbeitet = 'one works' etc. 'They were a detective' is improper in English anyway.

When the sex of an individual is indeterminate or unspecified, the pronoun 'he' is to be used; 'he' is to be construed as masculine only when the antecedent is identified as male; it is indeterminate or neuter if the sex of the antecedent is not specified. It includes males and females. Likewise in German, one uses er.

'One takes his place, and he must remain silent'. In German, it would be the same, and the possessive pronoun sein would be used. Man nimmt seinen Platz, und er muss still bleiben.

One must work hard at his job if he is to succeed.

Man takes a masculine declension!

Nominative: man

Accusative: einen

Genitive: sein

Dative: einem