IN DEFENCE OF (GRAMMATICAL) GENDER

What English-speakers don't get about gender in other languages.

Hey Folks,

Lately I’ve fallen down a linguistics rabbit hole. Partly, my interest is practical - I’ve been studying Spanish since moving to Mexico three years ago - but partly I’m interested in language itself.

Partly this is due to my belief that human beings collectively generate our social reality through language. We form our individual beliefs in relation to “the world”, which if you think about it is really a concept generated by our minds through language. Surely there must be metaphysical and political implications of different uses of language. What are they?

I find languages very interesting because they show how humans have invented all kinds of ways of interpreting their experience and making something of their inner world accessible to others.

Language is fascinating because it is simultaneously a tool that we use to communicate our experience to others and the means we use to create our reality. I am firmly of the opinion that language is not merely a means of communication, but also an organ of perception.

Along the way, I’ve become interested in whether the way that we speak makes certain forms of political organization more likely. Do certain languages train people to perceive reality in a way which makes conflict more likely? It seems to me like this is a reasonable hypothesis, as it certainly seems like that certain cultures are more aggressive than others. Do different languages train our brains to have different attitudes towards one another and the world we live in?

I am far from the first person to ask such questions, but it seems to me like a very difficult question to answer. I can compare English, Spanish, and French, the three languages I speak, but each of these three languages evolved in the context of feudalism. If we accept the idea that different languages encode different cultural values, I would expect that all three of the languages I speak would teach us to perceive a high degree of hierarchy as “the way of the world”.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. I should probably say a little about where I’ve coming from before I get too far into the weeds.

THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS

There is a theory called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, for instance, which proposes that different languages cause people to perceive reality differently.

If you haven’t heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I recommend watching the following video. It’s a fascinating idea, well worth knowing about.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has two versions - the strong version, which is known as linguistic determinism, and a weak version, which is called linguistic relativity. Since the hypotheses were proposed over a century ago, however, there seems to have been little progress in determining the precise degree to which different languages predispose people to see things differently.

It’s undeniable that speakers of different languages perceive aspects of reality differently. For instance, different languages have different numbers of colour terms, causing speakers of said languages to perceive colour differently. One could also look at the ways that different languages have of describing the passage of time, which is quite a fascinating subject.

No one would deny that different languages cause people to think differently, but it’s an open question how much any of this stuff matters. Speakers of different languages belong to different cultures, meaning that it is difficult to say what differences between perceptions are caused by language and which are caused by culture.

For example, some languages assign nouns gender. In French and Spanish, nouns are either masculine or feminine. German makes things even more complicated by adding a third, neutral gender.

German people have a reputation for being efficient, rational, and logical, but I’ve never heard their language described in such terms. This would seem to suggest that it is German culture that makes German that way, not their language.

(If you want to hear Mark Twain making fun of German grammar, by the way, I highly recommend his hilarious essay The Awful German Language.)

So, does grammatical gender cause people to see the world differently? Some people claim that it does, such as the people who advocate for what’s called “Lenguaje Inclusivo”, which proposes replacing gendered nouns with neutral ones.

In Lenguaje Inclusivo, which is a restricted from of Spanish, the masculine noun “Chicos” becomes “Chic@s”, “Chicxs,” or “Chiques”. The pronouns el and ella (he and she) can be replaced by the gender-neutral elle.

But is this an improvement? Wouldn’t be easier to keep track of who is doing what in a given sentence if different pronouns were used for subject and object? After all, it’s much easier to keep track of who’s doing what to whom when talking about a man and a woman than when talking about two men or two women.

She paced nervously as she awaited his arrival. He was late, but she wouldn’t’ve expected otherwise from someone so over-burdened as responsibilities as she imagined as he must be since the siege had begun. Part of her, the part of her that still loved him, wished that she had never left. She had no difficulty imagining how much more harder things must have been for him without her. But what was done was done.

Now, compare that to this:

She paced nervously as she awaited her arrival. She was late, but she wouldn’t’ve expected otherwise from someone so over-burdened as responsibilities as she imagined as she must be since the siege had begun. Part of her, the part of her that still loved her, wished that she had never left. She had no difficulty imagining how much more harder things must have been for her without her. But what was done was done.

Obviously, the second paragraph is completely unintelligible. As readers, we very quickly lose track of who a specific pronoun refers to when the same pronouns are used to refer to different people. But when those pronouns are different, we can follow much more complex constructions.

Although Lenguaje Inclusivo could theoretically make learning Spanish easier for English speakers, it would come at a cost in terms of clarity.

Furthermore, it’s not clear at all that implementing it would make any difference in how people think about the differences between men and women, or that such a consciousness shift would result in improved relations between women and men.

For one thing, there’s no real reason to believe that Spanish or French speakers see objects as more or less masculine or feminine depending on their grammatical gender. For example, the most commonly used slang term for penis in Mexico is “la verga”, which is feminine. And in French the word for vagina, “le vagin”, is masculine. Yet that doesn’t means that Mexicans think of penises as feminine or that the French see vaginas as masculine.

Furthermore, there are advantages to having grammatical gender. For one thing, it sounds prettier. Because so many words end with -o, -a, -os, and -as in Spanish, everyday speech in Spanish contains plenty of internal rhymes, which makes it roll off the tongue in a way that English doesn’t.

This feature of the Spanish language may be responsible for the fact that Spanish has five easily pronounceable vowel sounds, whereas English has twenty.

If you’re a native English speaker, you may not be aware of how difficult English is to pronounce. Could it be that the internal rhymes caused by grammatical gender in Spanish reduce phonetic drift?

I’ve never heard anyone propose this explanation for grammatical gender, but it makes sense to my mind. Although there is quite a lot of variation between regional varieties of Spanish, they are generally mutually intelligible and tend not to stray too far from the five “pure” vowel sounds.

I also watched a video in which a linguistics YouTuber convincingly shows that German speakers can follow speech in a noisy environment better than English speakers, because grammatical gender includes a bunch of embedded referents which provide a greater number of context clues than English does.

Watch it! It’s pretty cool!

So although grammatical gender is for sure a pain in the ass when learning any language as an adult, it’s not nearly as useless as you might think.

Just be glad that you’re not learning Swahili, which has 11 genders!

GRAMMATICAL GENDER = NOUN CLASSES

“Wait, what?” I hear you asking. “Eleven genders? You’ve got to be kidding me. Are Swahilis the trans-est people on Earth or something?”

Well… no. In order to understand how the Swahili language can have 11 genders, you’re going to have ditch the idea that grammatical gender is all about between a binary between masculine and feminine.

Honestly, I kind of think that the term “gender” is a misnomer when it comes to grammar. Grammatical “gender” really comes from the word “genre”, meaning “a type” or “a class” or “a kind” of thing. Things could be sorted into masculine or feminine, as they are in Spanish, or masculine, feminine, and neutral, as they are in German.

In the case of Swahili, nouns belong to noun classes, each of which must be treated differently in order to speak in grammatically correct sentences. And that’s ultimately what grammatical gender is. It has to do with systems that different languages have for classifying objects. To refuse to respect grammatical gender is to refuse the logic of every language which uses grammatical gender. It’s simply a bad attitude for a language learner. After all, isn’t part of the reason to learn a second language the appeal of learning a new way of thinking? Perhaps it’s not the best idea to assume that grammatical gender is nothing but an antiquated relic that makes life more confusing.

English speakers would be well-advised not to think of grammatical gender as “male” and female”. French speakers don’t perceive tables as female because “la table” is a feminine noun. That’s not a thing.

In French, nouns are classed into two broad classes in a pretty arbitrary fashion. A total lack of rhyme or reason is the general trend, as many frustrated language learners have pointed out.

By the way, I think it’s interesting that English, like other Germanic languages, used to have three grammatical genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter - but they fell into disuse after England was invaded by Vikings.

IN DEFENCE OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER

I’m here to tell you that there really are practical advantages to differentiating between noun classes. It allows a speaker to specify what or whom precisely they are speaking about. Although it might be a pain in the ass to learn about as an adult, to native speakers that isn’t a problem. Children learning Spanish as a first language have no more trouble with grammatical gender as a concept than we do with words like “it” and “them”. When you learn to classify nouns as masculine or feminine as a child, the cognitive process appears to be completely intuitive.

GRAMMATICAL GENDER IS A LINGUISTIC SWITCH

Let’s consider a situation which one person is speaking to another about two similar objects. Let’s say, for instance, that a mechanic is asking his assistant to pass him a certain tool.

If he were to say “Dame la grande”, while gesturing to his tools his assistance could deduce that the mechanic was not referring to a hammer, because “el martillo” is a masculine noun and would not be referred to by the article “la”, which is feminine.

By saying “Dame la grande”, the tradesman has narrowed down the possibilities for his assistant. Since about 50% of nouns are masculine, the mechanic has in effect ruled out 50% of the tools. Furthermore, he is asking for “the big one”, which presumably means two similar tools of the same grammatical gender are being referred to. Because “el martillo” is masculine, we know that both the bigger and smaller tools being referred to cannot possibly be a hammer.

Within context, the phrase “Dame la grande” encodes far more information than “Give me the big one” does. If our mechanic had wanted a big hammer, he would have said “Dame el grande”. This shows that grammatical gender does actually provides useful context clues, which facilitates communication in the real world.

English allows us to differentiate between “this” and “that”, “these” and “those”, and so forth. One might think of these word pairs as linguistic switches. If placed in the “ON” position, so to speak, they have the opposite function than if they were switched off. Languages with grammatical gender have an additional function which allows speakers to speak with more precision because they differentiate between objects through a specialized system of noun classification. That’s all grammatical gender.

ENGLISH HAS GRAMMATICAL GENDER… BUT MOST PEOPLE DON’T REALIZE IT.

By that definition, by the way, English does have grammatical gender. It’s called animacy, and causes us to treat animate objects (people, deities, magical creatures, and certain animals) differently from inanimate ones.

If I were to tell you that “Someone left something on the beach,” the meanings of the word “someone” and “something” have distinct meanings. They are not interchangeable, as in one word the the linguistic switch is on and in the other it is off. If I were to say that “Something left someone on the beach,” that would have a different meaning (possibly suggesting that we had suddenly wound up inside a Stephen King novel).

The difference between “someone” and “something” refers to animacy, which is a type of grammatical gender.

So there you have it. English has grammatical gender. Most people just don’t realize it.

By the way, linguists believe that what we think of as grammatical gender - the linguistic switch between masculine and feminine - actually originally distinguished animate from inanimate. It seems that once languages began to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects grammatically, it made sense to begin referring to male and female people differently. And then people seem to have extended this system to all nouns in order to make the most of the specifying power of grammatical gender.

All of this makes a certain kind of sense, and I suppose that’s my point. Grammatical gender is counter-intuitive when you’re learning a second language, but it’s not nearly so illogical as it first appears.

I also think that people who promote the idea of changing language to become more “inclusive” owe it to society to take the time to really understand grammar before trying to change it. Linguistically speaking, inclusiveness isn’t a virtue is an of itself. Exclusion can be just as important as inclusion is. It just depends on context.

I am not entirely opposed to the idea of deliberating changing the use of language, but I believe that before even proposing any such change, people have a responsibility to really think things through. Would such changes make communication easier or more difficult? Are there trade-offs? What are the pros and cons?

Pronouns don’t hurt people. People hurt people.

My position is this: from what I know, purging grammatical gender from Romance languages is most likely impossible, or at least WAAAAAAAAAY more trouble than it is worth, especially since there isn’t convincing evidence to support the theory that grammatical gender is responsible for the oppression of women or the newly-discovered phenomenon of “trans people” or “non-binary people”.

You know that saying that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”? It’s kinda like that. Pronouns don’t hurt people. People hurt people.

What we have is a tiny special interest group who is making an extremely tall order. Trans ideologues want all of us to change the way we speak in order to accommodate their linguistics preferences. That’s a very big ask.

Rather than rejecting their ideas, I would like to answer their proposals with some questions of my own. If we’re going to reform language to reflect our ideologies, perhaps we can turn this into a conversation. Are trans ideologues willing to make changes to accommodate for my ideologically-informed linguistic preferences?Perhaps I might prefer than the English distinction between “mine” and “yours” be eliminated in favour of the universal possessive pronoun “ours” in the belief individualized possessive pronouns discourage sharing.

Seriously, though, if I were to propose such a shift, I’d better be prepared to make the case that the change I’m proposing would actually have the desired effect, hadn’t I? This is basically what trans ideologues are doing. They are claiming that their proposed changes would have a positive downstream effects, but I haven’t seen them actually make their case in an intellectually honest way.

A good place to start would be by comparing the status of women in cultures which speak languages with grammatical gender versus those without them. Neither Farsi nor Turkish have it, but neither Iran nor Turkey are generally thought of as progressive when it comes to the status of women, are they?

Take a good look at this map, which should provide a rough idea of which cultures use grammatical gender and which don’t. I don’t see a strong correlation between genderless languages and a higher status for females. Do you?

There is no grammatical gender in any Chinese language, yet you would be hard-pressed to find a culture in which violence against females was as normalized as it was over the course of the centuries during which foot-binding was customary.

SO IS IT REALLY WORTH THE EFFORT OF ELIMINATING GRAMMATICAL GENDER?

Trans ideologues expect us to take it for granted that eliminating grammatical gender would improve society somehow, but they don’t seem to have proven their case.

I don’t think that it’s overly selfish to ask “What’s in it for us?” when special interest groups propose altering our languages. After all, we’re all being asked to change how we speak at a pretty fundamental level.

From what I have seen of attempts to reform French pronunciation to be more inclusive to gender ideologues, it’s simply far more trouble than it’s worth. It’s difficult, counter-intuitive, and needlessly ugly.

And somehow, it seems like in German it is even more complicated! Someone oughta break out the Ouija board and let Mark Twain know that Germans somehow found a way to make their grammar way worse!

At the end of the day, changing a language is a daunting and difficult undertaking. Along it may be interesting to think about how language shapes us, it seems to me unlikely to be particularly fruitful to opine about what the ideal way for people to speak would be. In most situations, the best way to speak is the way which is most likely to be understood.

At the end of the day, people are going to speak how they’re going to speak, and you’ve got to meet them where they’re at. If we’re going to talk seriously about linguistic reform, we’ve got to be realistic. People are people, whatever language they speak. There are discussions worth having about how children should be taught to speak, but adults tend to be pretty set in their ways. They’re going to choose words in ways that make sense to them and the people they’re speaking with. Language is primarily practical, not ideological. And that’s a feature, not a bug.

Let me be clear that I am not against the idea of linguistic reform, or of becoming conscious of how the way we speak trains our brains to think. But all proposals that I have seen to reform English, French, Spanish, and German to make them “more inclusive” seem to me to miss the mark.

Truth be told, I just don’t care about the plight of people who struggle with gender identity. Personally, my attitude towards such people is “Suck it up, buttercup.” And if that sounds harsh, well, trans ideologues have been busily problematizing masculinity for years now. People like me feel targeted and attacked by trans ideology because its entire premise seems to turn on the idea that straight cis heterosexual males like me need to be cured of their “toxic masculinity”. The hidden message is that masculinity is sickening. That is what is being implied by the “toxic” in “toxic masculinity”.

Something toxic is something that makes other people sick. Please forgive me if I’m being over-sensitive, but I know that I’m not alone in feeling that trans ideologues feel that people like me need to be reformed. Well, guess what?

So, yeah… if trans people wanted to ask humanity to do them a big favour and reform their languages for their sake, maybe it wasn’t the best idea to spend years insulting masculinity. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say:

1. I’ve had enough of this bullshit.

2. You haven’t thought things through properly.

3. Your proposed linguistic reforms have significant downsides and would be net losses for humanity.

I genuinely think that trans ideologues would be better off learning to meditate than proposing a bunch of new rules that everyone has to follow. After all, meditation tends to make people aware of the transitory, temporary, and illusory nature of ego-identification, which is all that identity really is. Although some people may feel very strongly that they do not belong in a given linguistic category, that’s honestly just not a problem that requires a societal solution. That’s a problem which requires an individualized solution, namely internalization of the timeless wisdom of the mantra “Sticks and Stones can Break my Bones, but Words can Never Hurt Me.”

So… what do you think? How do you feel about grammatical gender and inclusive language? If you speak a language with grammatical gender, do you find it annoying? Is classifying nouns in this way more trouble than it’s worth? Could the internal rhymes engendered by grammatical gender in Spanish help resist phonetic drift, making Spanish easier to pronounce and interpret?

(I’m proud of this last theory, as I’ve never heard anyone propose it before.)

How much difference does the language one speaks matter, anyway? Am I wasting time by getting super-granular about language? Am I engaging in the type of navel-gazing that radical theorists so often succumb to? Or am I onto something?

If there are notable differences between how speakers of different languages construct reality, are there some linguistic imprints that tend to reduce social conflict? That’s what I think we should be looking for.

I strongly suspect that evidence could be found to support the theory that some languages lead to more arguing than others, and that arguing leads to other forms of social conflict, including blood feuding and war.

Let’s say that a large sample of languages from peaceful societies could be studied cross-culturally, and that certain invariant elements could be identified. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if such a theory could be proved. But even if such a theory were accepted, could you convince everyone to alter their manner of speech? I think that most people would refuse. Even if they could be somehow convinced of the soundness of your ideas, I doubt they would be willing to forfeit their habitual ways of speaking.

Furthermore, the very idea of altering language as part of an ideological project has a totalitarian feel to it. Anarchism has a natural preference for the vernacular over the official, meaning that I’m unlikely to throw myself into efforts towards linguistic reform.

IF PEOPLE DO ONE DAY DECIDE TO TAKE THE IDEA OF LINGUISTIC REFORM SERIOUSLY, WE SHOULD LOOK TOWARDS ESPERANTO

That said, if there was a sudden renewal of interest in Esperanto, I would be totally into that. Personally, I am not in favour of English being the world’s international language because it is far more difficult to learn than Esperanto.

Most native English speakers don’t realize how difficult English is to learn, or how illogical its grammar (and spelling!) really is.

Esperanto, a constructed language based mostly on Romance and Germanic languages, is estimated to be about ten times earlier to learn. If the goal of linguistic reform were to create a world in which the greatest number of people possible were able to communicate in the same language, we would do well to consider the example of Esperanto.

So I think I’ve reached the end of my line of questioning for now. My question had to do with whether it would be worthwhile to extend our political analysis to the structure of the languages we speak themselves. My conclusion is that although it may influence perception, it doesn’t seem to matter nearly so much other socioeconomic determinants.

This stuff probably does matter, to a degree, but it just seems like too tall of an order to convince people to change the way they speak.

Generally, people are able to say whatever they need to say in whatever language they speak. Although certain languages might allow for more efficient communication in certain ways, I would expect to find a whole bunch of trade-offs. One language might be objectively superior to another in one way and inferior to that very language in another. And in any case, most people will continue to communicate in the way that it easier for them.

I hope you share my opinion that all this stuff is extremely interesting! Thinking about language is a great way of thinking about thought, and thinking about thought is the only way that we can even begin to conceive of our relationship to the world we inhabit.

And at the end of the day, grammatical gender’s really not that bad. It’s got pros and cons. Although it may be a big pain in the ass sometimes, they’re no way around it if you’re learning French or Spanish or German or about a million other languages. If you ask me, you’re better off embracing it.

I rest my case.