not an Indon, but as a Malaysian, “kakak” is older sister, and “abang” is older brother.
I took Turkish specifically because there is no grammatical gender. He, she, and it it are all the word o.
I worked with some Chinese people and learned a little Cantonese as a sort of gesture of respect for them. In the Cantonese dialect, there is one third-person pronoun, which is obviously genderless, but there is a lot of quirky structure to the language, like the classifier words that help clarify what a thing is, because there are a lot of homonyms, and spoken Cantonese tends to be very succinct.
I discovered that some adjectives are nominally gender-specific – you use this word when applying the meaning to a man, this other, completely different word for a woman. It is not a formal grammatical specification as in the Romance languages, more of a standardized usage pattern. In this way, the genderless pronoun works because it is likely that some other word in the sentence will clarify he or she.
But it perfectly aligns with hi’s and her’s. 
Must I remind you–
How many puppy’s is that, now?
Japanese arguably doesn’t have pronouns, but what it does have (diectic classifiers?) can change dramatically, depending on the gender and status of both the speaker and the subject.
I just wanted to remark that the Queen Elizabeth hotel in Montreal is called, in French, Le Reine Elizabeth. Because hotel is masculine.
My wife does the same. I am used to it from hearing her mix up the pronouns for 20+ years. And my struggles with Hungarian grammar dwarf any mistakes she makes in English.
We have a few cases of that in English. One would very seldom refer to a woman as “handsome”, or a man as “pretty” (though of course there are exceptions both ways).
It’s also worth mentioning that grammatical gender need not have any relation whatsoever to sex. Indo-European genders are usually masculine, feminine, and (possibly) neuter, but there are languages that have grammatical genders for “tall” vs. “short”, or “animate” vs. “inanimate”, or other distinctions.
I wonder what the current discussion in the USA re choosing the personal pronouns we want to be addressed by (her/she, him/they, etc.) looks like to someone who grew up with a language that does not use such pronouns. Would they readily grasp the importance of this to the person making the request? Or would it be more, “huh, I don’t get it”?
May I remind you that puppies have a troubling tendency to pupate into dogs. In some cases, this works out ok, or well, but, in too many cases, the result is not a net positive.
Incidentally, I’ve read that there’s no consistent relation between whether a language has different words for “he” and “she” and whether the society in which that language is spoken is sexist. This may be rather surprising, but it seems that the structure of a language has less effect on the culture of a society in which that language is spoken than you might think. I tried to find a citation for this claim, but I can’t find anything offhand. Does anyone else have a citation for it?
Japanese does have pronouns which function as such, but their use is radically different than English (and other Western languages I’m not as familiar with).
Japanese sentences frequently drop the subjects and or the objects when understood so there isn’t much need for pronouns. In English we would say “I saw the doctor. He/She/They said . . . .” so it forces the speaker to choose a pronoun.
In Japanese the subjects are usually dropped because they are understood (I’m telling the story so it’s me. The person diagnosing me is the doctor I saw, and not some random stranger or the plumber, for example, so it’s not necessary to specify who said it.
Japanese also has other elements in the language which specify the relative status of the various individuals, which helps identify who is performing the action. くれた kureta means that (someone) gave me or us (something) and あげた ageta means I or we gave (something) to (someone). That and many other elements of Japanese allow subjects and objects to be dropped.
This does lead to confusion at times, even among native speakers. I have had parallel conversations with people, with both of us assuming we were talking about one thing but where the implied subjects were different.
That can happen in English when the same gendered pronouns are used for both the subject and object, “She gave her a piece of her mind.”
Yes, Indonesian and Malaysian are mutually intelligible but they always choose different words for everything! When I had studied a bit of Indonesian, I was delighted when a Malaysian came to visit my office, thinking I’d show off my language skills. So I casually asked, “Pak, jam berapa?” to which he instantly said, “Oh, you speak Indonesian!”
I responded, “yes, as a matter of fact…but how did you know from just three words that I studied Indonesian and not Malaysian?” You’ll know the answer to that, of course, which is that a Malaysian would say “pukul berapa.”
“Abang” is used in Indonesian sometimes*, but “kakak” is the more universal term. Depends on where in Indonesia you are, of course … In Sumatera you are more likely to hear the same word choices as in Malaysia.
*If I recall correctly, the “Bung” in “Bung Karno” as an affectionate term for Sukarno derives from “abang.”
An example from German that I remember finding interesting because of what it taught me about how the language works: the word for girl, “Mädchen,” is grammatically neuter — das Mädchen — instead of taking the feminine “die.” This is obviously counterintuitive and a little mystifying, the first time you encounter it.
But the reason for this is that “-chen” is a diminutizing suffix, added to a base noun to express the idea of a smaller version of itself, and when you do this, the noun always becomes neuter regardless of the gender of the original word. “Der Tisch,” the table (masculine), becomes “das Tischchen,” the little table (neuter).
And when you know this, you mentally remove the “-chen” and find “Mäd,” and you can see how the original now-antiquated sense of “maid” as in “maiden” for “unmarried teenager” served as the basis for “Mädchen” meaning young girl, and the neuter gender is just an accident of construction.
Fun with languages!
To be fair, that’s a point that even throws many Germans. You often hear someone say something like “Das Mädchen hatte rote Haare, und sie war sehr hübsch.” (The girl had red hair, and she was very pretty), where correctly it should be “…, und es war sehr hübsch.”
I find this thread very interesting and have read and learned a lot from the responses, but I cannot stop wondering why you think English is a language rich in gendered pronouns, when actually it’s (ha!) articles are completely genderless. OK, articles are not pronouns, but they are structurally closely related. Look:
The cat. El gato (male). Die Katze. (female)
The spoon. La cuchara (female). Der Löffel (male).
The fork. El tenedor (male). Die Gabel (female).
Should you doubt the close relation between articles and pronouns, just make a second sentence:
The cat has nice eyes. Her (his? Its?) eyes are yellow.
“The” hides the gender, but you still assume it, I reckon, when you follow through with qualifiers.
A man is handsome, a woman is pretty, you mean? Beautiful!
Check the Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis, specifically its (sic!) critique. Spoiler: The hypothesis seems to be wrong(ish).
I suspect that strongly gendered languages actually would have an effect of making biological gender less important, due to grammatical gender being so important. The gender used in speech isn’t as ties to who you are if a girl can be neuter or a pot can be male.
The goal is just that trans people are not forced into their gender assigned at birth, and that nonbinary people are not forced into binary gender. In English, people use pronouns as part of this.
The term “gender” has a lot of connotations. The original use of “gender” is exactly “kind”; that is, a word’s gender is what kind of word it is. “Gender” and “kind” are related words.*
Speakers of Latin and related languages noticed that two of the major kinds of words were associated with the male sex and with the female sex. Thus began the association of gender, a grammatical grouping, became associated with sex, a biological/social grouping.
English had grammatical gender, but lost it during the partial creolization with Norse. Modern English has no grammatical gender, unless you want to consider nouns that take a standard plural form (dog/dogs, fox/foxes, etc) as a separate group from non-standard plural forms (child/children, mouse/mice, etc). And even then there’s no longer any adjective matching.
When we talk about “gender” within Modern English, we are referring to semantic sex. The pronouns “he” and “she” have no gender, in the sense of being a part of a group of words with similar grammatical properties. But “he” and “she” have gender, in the sense of the referent’s sex.
This is a point of confusion when languages differ where they have grammatical gender (words with similar grammatical forms) and differ where they have semantic gender (words that depend on sex).
Recently, we’re trying to disambiguate pronoun usage from social roles from biology, which adds more connotations. See any discussions about gender and sex in modern society.
*Note, that “kind” has added its own connotations–being kind (compassionate) to someone is treating them as being a part of one’s own kind (group).