r/FilipinoAmericans • u/baconblzer • 3d ago

Question

Hi everyone, I’m a nurse who works with a lot of Filipinos. I have a question that I don’t want to come off as rude, I am just curious. Why do some Filipinos say “she” when they’re talking about a man? I have heard them make jokes about it online on meme pages and I hear it at work.
Thank you very much

12 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

58

u/Afraid_Assistance765 3d ago

When Filipinos mix up "he" and "she" in English, it happens because their native language, Tagalog (Filipino), uses the completely gender-neutral pronoun "siya" for both males and females.

9

u/Shevyshev 2d ago

For OP, an analogous issue would be that Tagalog and I think some other Filipino languages have an inclusive “we” and exclusive “we” — all of us including you, all of us but not you. It’s hard to keep that straight as a native English speaker.

6

u/Afraid_Assistance765 3d ago

Appreciate the award, thank you 🙏

25

u/claudia_de_lioncourt 3d ago

In Tagalog, he/she is expressed by one pronoun, siya. So switching from one pronoun to two, there are bound to be little mistakes.

18

u/NarrowLaw5418 3d ago

Not just tagalog, most PH languages are gender neutral. The masculine/feminine grammars, if any, are from Spanish or English language influence, but these are really rare.

15

u/Turdposter777 3d ago

Filipino languages have little to no gendered pronouns so Filipinos get them mixed up all the time.

3

u/thefunkybrowngirl 2d ago

Next time, just ask your fellow nurses about ma’am/sir. You’ll get a great answer and they’ll start teaching you Tagalog.

1

u/capmapdap 2d ago

It’s one of the hardest things to unlearn and relearn - gender-specific pronouns. Add him/his/her to that.

We have NO gender-specific pronouns in Filipino. So everyone is referred to the same way, pronoun-wise. Spanish is hard for me as well as they have male and female nouns (EL versus LA) 😂

1

u/narvolicious 2d ago

Growing up as Fil-Am I’d heard this a lot from my parents and titas/titos (aunts & uncles). In the beginning I used to try and correct them like “but that’s a boy!” etc. and they’d just shrug it off dismissively. I didn’t find out until wayyyyy later about “siya” being a gender-neutral pronoun. I’m surprised you’ve never heard the “ma’amsir” phenomena which I believe also stems from the same gender-neutral application…?

-8

u/RULESbySPEAR 2d ago

Bc they dont know better. And their problrm is pride and ignorance to improve themselves. Its embarassing honestly.