In the Italian language, a research for suitable expressions to represent people who do not recognize themselves in the gender binary is underway, to the scope of promoting a language that will be more respectful of diversity and inclusive of all genders. Contrary to English, apparently a less gendered language, the Italian language is indeed a gendered language that declines subjects, verbs, articles and adjectives in a binary way.

Socio-psycho-linguistic studies are producing multiple proposals, on which there is currently no agreement among non-binary people, though forms such as (tutte/i/u) have been recently adopted in the spoken language.

Originally, the asterisk (*) was proposed but this solution presented problems for people with visual impairment. At the moment, the most commonly used representation is Schwa (ə), the letter ‘E’ of the international phonetic alphabet, reversed by 180°. At the same time, this solution is also strongly opposed, especially in the academic field.
At the basis of the morpho-syntactic question, there is still in Italy a question of non-recognition of people with non-binary gender identities from a legal and social point of view. The Italian language therefore reproduces the state of things in the country: with discussion and proposition of the above-mentioned solutions in the written language, whenever possible; whilst in the spoken language the masculine gender continues to be used to represent all genders or the masculine/feminine declination is preferred.