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People who think “preferred pronouns” is a novel idea obviously don’t speak a language that has more than one second-person pronoun.
I’m not saying being “mis-formalised” is anything like the same as being mis-gendered, but it is something that Welsh speakers have to negotiate regularly, and it can be a bit fraught. A tutor I’d never met before visited my nightclass last week, and our “ti/chi” settings had to be calibrated when we made different choices.
As a second language speaker, I was taught to default to the more formal “chi” when speaking to a new person, and taking my lead from them. As I’ve got older, I’ve become more comfortable using the “ti” form on first meeting a person, unless they’re obviously of an older generation (a rapidly shrinking cohort, let’s be honest).
@nic I had this experience in German (my internet friends apparently found it very weird being Sie-ed) and now I get the joy of discovering it again in Welsh
@Jhynjhiruu It causes problems in software localisation as well. Some folk definitely prefer the singular/informal form, but the plural/formal covers all cases, and doesn’t cause as many mutations!
@nic I almost always use formal forms when translating unless I know exactly who the target is - though in my case it's moreso because I'm English and scared of being rude to a stranger than any grammar concerns!