摘要：The present study reports on University of Swaziland students’ preferences in the use of occupationalnaming terms and gender neutrality in third person singular pronouns’ use. This case study employed the surveydesign to source information from 80 respondents. An 18-item self-administered questionnaire and follow upinterviews sourced data on students’ preferred occupational terms and gender neutral pronouns and the rationalefor the particular preferences. Findings indicated that despite the increasing calls for gender neutrality in languageuse, university students still prefer gendered terms for sex-specific references and reserve gender neutral terms forreferences to persons of unknown sex. In terms of pronoun preferences, double pronoun constructions and the useof the androgynous ‘they’ represent the most preferred strategies of dealing with the pronoun problem among theuniversity students. The study recommended the recognition of the language the users view as practical in any formof language planning.
