The concept of linguistic relativity has been tested by psychologists, anthropologists and scientists for years and they’ve all wondered whether our lifestyle influence the words required by our language or if the words we use influence the way we think. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis argues the latter; the structure of the language we use can have a large influence on how we view the world. One area that has been heavily studied and researched in terms of linguistic relativity is the issue of gender.

People who speak multiple languages have most likely come across this issue more than once. A huge difference that most bilingual people will notice is that different languages use gender in very different ways. Gendered languages are more common than not. For example, languages like French, Spanish and Russian assign gender to all of their nouns and doing this determines the way certain words will be conjugated. English is not known as a heavily gendered language. English gendered words do exist -these are words like he/she, him/her, buck/doe- but in comparison to most languages around the world, our use of gendered language is scarce.

Take the French language for example. In French, there is no such thing as a gender- neutral plural like the English word “they”. Instead, they use the feminine pronoun “elles” to describe a group of females, and the masculine pronoun “ils” to describe a group of males. Even more interesting, however, is the fact that a mixed group is described with the masculine pronoun no matter what. If one male were to enter a group of twenty females, the pronoun changes from “elles” to “ils” regardless of ratio. This is true for many of the “romance” languages and there’s been much debate about the idea that speaking a gendered language makes the culture more sexist or creates more gender division.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis would suggest that the use of gendered nouns in languages affects the cultures overall views of the differences between male and female members largely more than a culture that uses a non-gendered language. There was a study done in 2011 by Cubelli, Paolieri and Lotto on the effects that grammatical gender has on object categorization. They had participants who spoke a gendered language and participants who spoke a non- gendered language judge whether two objects (of the same or different genders) belonged in similar or different groups. They found that when the two objects shared a grammatical gender the responses of the gendered language speakers were faster than when the two objects were of different grammatical genders. They found that these effects were language specific; speakers of gendered languages like Italian and Spanish displayed these results consistently while speakers of the non-gendered language of English showed an absence of these results. (Cubelli, 2011).

These results show us that there is a systematic, fast, and unconscious effect of assigning gender to nouns in an arbitrary manner. Use of grammatical gender becomes part of the conceptual representation of the objects being represented when the language is being learned and eventually ends up influencing the way the objects are thought of. (Cubelli, 2011)

Another study done by Lera Boroditsky and Lauren Schmidt in 2000 looked at whether the gender assigned to certain nouns is truly arbitrary and whether the assigned genders have semantic consequences. They found that although gender assignment is not completely arbitrary for every case, people do include gender in the representations they conceptualize of inanimate objects. They also found that people’s ideas of the genders of objects are strongly influenced by the assigned grammatical genders assigned to the objects in their native language. (Boroditsky, 2000)

One way to understand language and gender relativity is by looking at change over time in the English language. What a lot of people don’t know is that English used to be a gendered language. What we now call “Old English” is the language that the current English language derived from. Grammatical gender in English faded away sometime between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Although it’s not entirely certain why this happened, it’s suggested that the disappearance of gender happened because of a mixing of the languages Old English and Old Norse that happened in Northern England at the time. Most people at that time were bilingual in both, but these languages were gendered in contradictory ways. In order to clear up communication, English may have evolved towards a less gendered path.

It makes sense that assigning gender to language can effect the views of the society that speaks it, and many movements are continuously being made to steer towards gender-neutral language for that reason. An example is the new gender-neutral pronoun “hen” that has been officially introduced into the swedish language. (Stockholm, 2015) Another example is the official statement put out by the dean of Yale instituting the terms “first-year” and “upper level” students in place of the more popular “freshmen” and “upperclassmen” (Chun, 2017). This shows us that people are affected by the type of language we use and language does affect the way people view the world around them.

Countries that use a grammatical gender system have also been linked to higher rates of gender inequality. A study done by Prewitt-Freilino and Caswell looked at languages around the world and compared them against each other in terms of gender equality and whether they use a gendered language or not. They found that on average, countries that use a grammatical gender ranked lowest on the gender equality scale. (Prewitt-Freilino, 2012) Yemen, Chad and Pakistan are all countries that predominantly speak gendered language, and they all scored lowest for gender-equality respectively. Finland and Iceland both speak naturally gendered and genderless languages both tied for most gender-equal. (Prewitt-Freilino, 2012)

Around the world, gender is used in different ways and we have found that it affects peoples’ thoughts and beliefs in many situations. This is one of the many topics that can be looked at when discussing the Sapir-whorf hypothesis and the topic of language relativity. It’s a topic that has been currently creating a lot of uproar all throughout the world because people everywhere have begun noticing the effects gendered language can create. There are many studies that have been done to show the difference in mindset between countries that use a gendered language and countries that don’t and they all show us the same thing: gendered language effects perceptions and behaviors of people everywhere.

References:

Boroditsky, Lera & A. Schmidt, Lauren. (2000). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Chun, M. M. (2017, September 07). First-year? Upper-level? A guide to Yale College’s usage. Retrieved December 05, 2017, from https://yalecollege.yale.edu/deans- office/messages/first-year-upper-level-guide-yale-colleges-usage

Cubelli, R., Paolieri, D., Lotto, L., & Job, R. (2011). The effect of grammatical gender on object categorization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37(2), 449-460.

Curzan, A. (2003). Gender Shifts in the History of English (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511486913

Prewitt-Freilino, J. L., Caswell, T. A., & Laakso, E. K. (2012). The gendering of language: A comparison of gender equality in countries with gendered, natural gender, and genderless languages. Sex Roles, 66(3-4), 268-281.

Stockholm, A. I. (2015, March 24). Sweden adds gender-neutral pronoun to dictionary. Retrieved December 05, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/24/sweden-adds-gender-neutral-pronoun- to-dictionary