Gender-neutral language is language that minimizes assumptions about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing. In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, English does not retain grammatical gender and most of its nouns, adjectives and pronouns are therefore not gender-specific. In most other Indo-European languages, nouns are grammatically masculine (as in Spanish "el humano") or grammatically feminine (as in French "la personne"), or sometimes grammatically neuter (as in German "das Mädchen"), regardless of the actual gender of the referent.