This is such weird timing! I literally just spent yesterday and today talking to someone about this, and I genuinely just had a moment of “But I’m sure you read my blog” before remembering that the whole conversation was actually in Welsh. What a fool I feel.
So, Steff and I put our heads together over a term for ‘non-binary’, because you’ll be unamazed to learn that Welsh has not yet had to form a lexicon on this subject. We’ve come up with “anddeuaidd”, which more or less literally means ‘non-binary’ but also kind of has to cover all forms of atypical gender identity because the language does not yet have the nuance to cover it all. That includes ‘agender’ - Welsh doesn’t have a word for ‘gender’, only ‘sex’, and so ‘agender’ literally - “diryw” - would actually mean ‘sexless’, and have all the same connotations that word has in English.
“Anddeuaidd” isn’t in common parlance or anything, of course. That’s literally just what Steff and I came up with, using his authority as a Translator and Guardian of the Language. And, just like if you said “I’m non-binary” to most people in English, the majority of your audience won’t have a clue what it means, so you’ll still have to follow it up with a brief explanation. But, it’s a word, and I feel a pretty good one.
Pronouns, though. Trickier. Because, you see, Welsh is a more heavily gendered language than English anyway, so there’s no neutral pronouns, but… well.
So, without getting too deep into the grammatical quirks of the Welsh ‘to be’, we’re looking at three pronoun sets rather than the two in English - so while English would have ‘she/her’, for example, Welsh would have ‘she is/her/her (possessive)’. So the trick is something different for each.
With the first, “mae e’n” is “he is” and “mae hi’n” is “she is”. So, for a truly gender-neutral experience, you go for “mae’n”. Which I suppose translates to “_ is”. This is also pretty well ensconced in oral Welsh these days, actually, which is handy. To be hyper correct and formal, for example, “it’s sunny” would traditionally be “mae hi’n heulog” (because weather is feminine), but these days almost everyone would say “mae’n heulog”. So, you just apply that to a human. Simple enough.
The second - starts getting a bit trickier. There’s just no equivalent of “it”. But, that’s fine, really, because you can use “nhw” (“they”), like you would in English. It’s slightly more odd than it is in English, but only slightly. These things get normal with use, anyway.
But, the third! So this one is great, and really fucking Welsh, okay get this. So in Welsh, the word for “his” is “ei”. The word for “her” is “ei”. They’re both “ei”! Hooray! Hoorei! Eh? Ei?
Problem: Welsh mutates. The way in which you distinguish between a masculine “ei” and a feminine “ei” is through the mutations that immediately follow them. Masculine “ei” gets a soft mutation, feminine “ei” gets an aspirate mutation. That’s not foolproof, actually, because some letters are immune to both of those - “ei sanau”, for example, means who the fuck knows the gender of whoever owns those socks. But “ei gi” is “his dog”, while “ei chi” is “her dog”, so. You work it out?
What this means is, mutations are sometimes pronouns. Just to make everything really nice and clear. Sigh.
SO, when you ask people to use your new pronouns, you also have to request the mutations of your choice. Personally, I think the easiest way here must be to just drop all mutations after your possessive pronouns. Given that most people struggle with mutations anyway, that’s probably for the best. But hey, fuck it, if you identify as a third gender, why not use the third mutation type? Nasal mutation! “Ei nghi”! I mean, that’s awful, and no one will do it. But. Philosophically. Pretty cool.
So, TL;DR:
“Non-binary” = “anddeuaidd”
“NB he/she is” = “Mae’n”
“They” = “nhw”
“NB his/her” = “ei” + mutation of your choice (probably drop the mutation).
Okay, so we’ve been giving this a bit more thought, and I’ve done some research. Tagging in @sonnetscrewdriver and @galahheadgalahad as the two people who asked about this.
In fact, there are two words in Welsh that can be used to mean ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’, and they are ‘cenedl’ and ‘rhywedd’. At first glance, ‘cenedl’ seems to be the way to go, because that’s the word used when you talk about grammar, i.e. “’Chair’ is feminine so you need a soft mutation, Timmy, you little shit.” Under those circumstances, if you use the word gender, you use ‘cenedl’. Problem solved!
… Except it’s not, because if you tried using ‘digenedl’ for agender, people would hear the other meaning of ‘cenedl’, which is ‘nation’. You would, in effect, have said “I’m nationless.” Very different statement, and it might set UKIP on you.
‘Rhywedd’, though, is bang on the money, I think. I’ve searched to check for context, because the last thing we need is for me to recommend this to a learner and then it turns out it’s also an old West Walian dialect word for a breeding sow or something, but one of the first hits I got back was NHS Cymru’s page on gender dysphoria in Welsh, and they are using ‘rhywedd’ - also Citizen’s Advice have a Welsh page on gender-based violence that uses it, and a Gender Conference Report looking at sexual discrimination in STEM fields, and the University of Wales Press uses it for its translation of Gender Studies, and yeah, I think we’ve found our match.
And then, I found NASUWT Cymru’s guidance for teachers on gender, which was extremely helpful because it had a paragraph (in both Welsh and English) that included the terms ‘non-binary’ and ‘non-gender’. Turns out, in Welsh you just take the long way round at the minute - they went with “y rhai hynny nad ydyn nhw’n ddeuol” for ‘non-binary’ (”those who are not binary”) and “y rhai hynny sy’n teimlo nad oes ganddyn nhw ryw” for ‘agender’ (”those who feel they don’t have a sex”).
So, basically, yeah, we need single words. Going with their declension endings and stuff, I would therefore revise “anddeuaidd” to “anddeuol”, and I would give ‘agender’ as “dirywedd”.
TL;DR:
“Non-binary” = “anddeuol” (pronounced “an-THEY-ol”)
“Agender” = “dirywedd” (pronounced “dee-REW-eth”, where the ‘th’ is pronounced like in the English ‘them’, and the middle syllable rhymes with the slang word ‘ew’, i.e. “omg he’s a transphobe? Ew.”)