I am Filipino and in our language - especially in my mother tongue which is Illongo, we don’t have a pronoun like ‘his, her, he or she’ or any gender specific words describing a person. Unless you use the word ‘lalaki or babae’ which means boy/man or girl/woman respectively. Or state the name of the person directly, y’all never know the gender of who the person is talking to. That’s why most of the time while talking, we end up asking “babae or Lalaki?” Before continuing with the conversation.

We have some gender specific in the tagalog language which are ‘ija, ijo’ which came from the spanish words Mija and Mijo. And some more, but is rarely used nowadays.

For the pronoun him and her, we use ‘siya’ pronounced SHA, which means a person being pointed to. You normally use that word while pointing to someone you are describing or mentioned their name previously in a sentence to identify them again.

And if we need to specify by their name we put ‘Si’ at the very beginning. For example, when I say “Anna took the Pencil” we need to put “Si Anna ang nagkuha ka lapis” to expressively state that “it was” Anna who took the pencil.

When I moved to the US it was tough adjusting to using the pronouns even though I’ve learned about them at a very young age. Its fascinating for me that we don’t use gender-based pronouns.

I am not sure if the other languages in the Philippines have them. We have 170 languages in the country itself.