Gender neutrality in languages without grammatical gender

Gender neutrality in genderless languages is the use of wording in those languages that avoids referring specifically to the male or female gender. This is typically achieved by using gender-exclusive words ("human being", "person", "businessperson", "caveperson"; "people", "businesspeople", "cavepeople", and so on) instead of gender-specific ones ("man", "businessman", "caveman", "men", "businessmen", "cavemen") when one speaks of people whose gender is unknown, ambiguous, or unimportant. When only a gender-specific word happens to be available, a gender-inclusive neologism may be coined to replace it.

As an Austronesian language, Malay is fundamentally gender-neutral. The third-person singular pronoun dia can mean 'she', 'he' or sometimes 'it', and the object/possessive suffix -nya can mean 'her/her(s)', 'him/his' or 'it/its'. For example, dia mencintainya means 'she/he loves her/him/it'.

Most nouns that refer to people are also gender-neutral, and need to be qualified when gender is to be expressed. For example, budak means 'child', and is used far more frequently than the gender-specific phrases budak perempuan, 'female child' and so 'girl', and budak lelaki, 'male child' and so 'boy'. Likewise, the words doktor ('doctor'), pelayan ('waiter') and most other nouns that are attributable to people are gender-neutral, and need to be modified by the adjectives perempuan or lelaki to become gendered (for animals, the adjectives betina and jantan are used instead; a harimau betina is a 'tigress'). However, Malay vocabulary has many nouns borrowed from Arabic and Sanskrit that do indicate gender. For example, an Islamic religious teacher is either an ustaz (male) or an ustazah (female), and a noble person is either a puteri ('princess') or a putera ('prince').

Tagalog, like other Austronesian languages, is gender-neutral; pronouns do not even have specific genders.

However, because Tagalog has had over three centuries of Spanish influence, gender is usually differentiated in certain Spanish loanwords by way of the suffixes -a (feminine) and -o (masculine). These words mostly refer to ethnicities, occupations, and family. Some examples are: Pilipina/Pilipino (Filipina/o) and their derivative nicknames Pinay/Pinoy, tindera/tindero (vendor), inhinyera/inhinyero (engineer), tita/tito (aunt/uncle), manang/manong (elder sister/brother), and lola/lolo (grandmother/grandfather). Chinese has also lent a few, mostly relating to kinship terminology such as ate (big sister) and kuya (big brother).

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