Language and Gender

As a kid, I struggled a lot with the assignment of gender to non-living things in Hindi. Neither of the other languages I knew (Tamil and English) have that concept, and it always felt weird why किताब (book) should have any gender. Even worse, there didn’t seem to be any logic to the assignment of gender.

 

English is an outlier in not assigning genders, says Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass. Most European languages (French, German) assign genders. On the other hand, several languages don’t even have words for ‘he’ and ‘she’! Like Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Vietnamese. Worst of all (confirming my childhood grouse on Hindi), most languages that assign genders to non-living objects don’t follow any pattern.

 

If a language loses gender words (he/she/it), well, it depends on which word(s) was lost. Spanish, French and Italian lost the “it” word (for non-living things) and so everything had to be male or female. Losing a gender word added to the chaos. English, on the other hand, lost both the he/she words for non-living things leading to simplicity on that front. (Why did English lose them? Probably because England got conquered and the language had to change to make it easier for the new lords to communicate with the locals).

 

But surely, assigning gender words to inanimate objects shouldn’t/can’t influence the speaker’s thoughts about those objects, right? To test that, they checked words in Spanish and German where the two languages assigned opposite genders e.g. bridge is masculine in Spanish but feminine in German. Native speakers were given such words (in their language) and asked what characteristics came to mind. Turned out people assigned characteristics based on the gender assigned (e.g. bridge/German/feminine led to elegant; but bridge/Spanish/masculine led to strong)!

 

But was the cause the gender that had been assigned? Or was it the predecessor words (like “el” or “la”) why the association happened? To rule out that possibility, they replaced words with pictures in a similar setup. No difference – the same pattern of language/gender/ characteristic emerged again.

 

But what if the whole setup was too artificial? After all, people were being asked what characteristics came to mind for inanimate objects. But when we use a language, nobody assigns characteristics to (most) inanimate objects. If you ask people in an experiment a meaningless question, perhaps they felt obliged to come up with an answer, so they paused, thought and came up with some answer. If that were the case, no conclusions could be drawn.

 

It looked like there was no way to test for the influence (or lack of influence) on how people thought of objects just because the language assigned genders. But clever researchers found a way. They came up with a memory game, where they assigned names of people to day to day objects e.g. ‘apple’ was Patrick, ‘bridge’ was Claudia and so on. The test was again done with speakers of languages that assigned genders to the objects. The finding? If the person name matches the gender of the object, then people did better at memorizing. Assign the opposite gender name, and people did worse at memorizing. This showed some kind of gender association for objects existed in the mind after all.

 

Is this consequential in real life? Hard to see how/why. Or at least nobody has found a way to test for it. But it is interesting that gender assignment via language does have an effect in some ways.

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