English and Swedish are common examples of where gender neutral pronouns have developed that sometimes meet ideological opposition from conservative thinkers but otherwise work largely fine in common parlance. They don’t make a lot of people look up and wonder what was said. They and hon don’t cause a fuzz because they are established to a sufficient degree. Now imagine that wasn’t the case and in English we wanted to land on “shup” as a pronoun. I talked with Billy and shup didn’t want to go fishing. You hear that and you’re almost taken out of the conversation because it doesn’t feel natural-in-the-language. Language being a cultural construct. (Don’t misconstrue me here as saying members of the LGBTQ+ are not natural. Because they are perfectly natural.)

German is not only a three-gender grammatical clusterfuck but also a language where different neo-pronouns (similar to “shup” which I invented just to make this point) exist, none of them feeling as natural-in-the-language when in use, and none of them getting majority support from the relevant LGBTQ+ community. So the general suggestion is to use the name when known or to ask for the pronouns when required. In my very limited experience, German speakers who don’t want to risk mis-pronouning people will sooner adapt their speech to avoid any use of third-person singular pronouns than to use “dey” or “sier.” Which in itself might be an indication of where this road is going. German has a larger gap than English between societal progress and understanding and having that reflected in the language. German has embarked on a journey to get rid of a masculine-as-default mode since the 70s just to include the other majority gender in speech and visibility. And more than 50 years later the conventions around that are still subject to change and adherence to those still piss off conservative thinkers. So that gives you an idea of a timeframe until gender-neutral language can cement itself in the German language.

Another language that may have an easier time with gender-neutral speech is Japanese. People are more used to using the name of the person as a stand-in where an indoeuropean tongue screams for a pronoun. And most nouns that are titles to give to people, such as a professions, are never gender-neutral by default.

they/them user here! in my lwmguage, its they/them (im english.) hope this helps!

In German there is nothing established. The most common one I have heard which is still unknown by most is “en/en” (not sure if written correctly).

My language Persian doesn’t have gendered pronouns at all

In French we have “iel”. It’s a mix of the male and female pronoms “il” and “elle”.

The language I know best besides English is Spanish, but since it’s not my culture, I decided to look it up, and there’s actually an interesting Wikipedia article about gender neutrality in Spanish.

There’s a separate page for a proposed single nonbinary pronoun “Elle” (pronounced A-yay) which I really like.

In Italian it’s not really used. There’s an extremely fringe group of people who use singular pronouns “Io” (I) but plural adjectives and participles. “Io sono andati” instead of “Io sono andato” or “Io sono stanchi” instead of “Io sono stanco”.

These are regarded as people who spend too much time on Tumblr and consume American media even within the most militant corners of the transfeminist movement, so it doesn’t have much traction.

Most of the discourse is about gender-neutral language rather than pronouns.

To add to the confusion, Italian has no neutral gender, only male and female, but it retains neutral pronouns: esso/essi. The problem is that by ending in “o”, most people think this is an alternative masculine pronoun and use it interchangeably with the masculine pronouns “egli” or “lui”.

I don’t think Croatian has it, and it is very gendered language. But some ideas

3rd person singular “ono” is literally translated “it” in English might work, but it feels dehumanizing when referred to one specific person, at least to me.

In my opinion what might work are 3rd person plural “oni” idk kinda hard when language is gendered.

every version in polish sounds either artificial, dehumanising, or silesian

In Turkish it’s all O. We do not have gendered pronouns, a singular third person is “o”, plural third person is “onlar”.

Most European languages have no equivalent, since everything is gendered, not just pronouns. Efforts to embed equality in those languages go the other way - adding female gendered terms for male-dominated professions and vice-verse, as opposed to removing gender which is just too hard.

Russian in particular is spoken in places where they’re hostile to the whole idea. They have a neuter gender, and you might see it used in a mocking “it” kind of way for queer people of all kinds.

For languages outside the Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic families it’s usually a moot issue; 3/4 have no grammatical gender features at all.

Official norwegian: hen/hens

Countless unofficial ones

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I’m not in all possible discourse-related spaces about Russian, but the surface level fight went around not pronouns, but nouns. Almost everything in Russian is gendered or inherits gender from the subject of the sentence, unlike English. So the questions liberals (non pejorative there) asked were about feminization of usually masculine-coded words describing most professions.

They/them would be они/их, and although I want to put it here and there and do so, it doesn’t seem to work as smooth due to completely different gendering system.

Tagalog: siya. 3rd person singular.

Nandito siya. He is here. She is here. They are here.