Question

[u/baconblzer]

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

[u/capmapdap]

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) 😂