Brief Exploration of Gender Representations in Languages

Languages respond to their cultures. They could often convey gender representations at a syntactic, morphological or lexical level. Based on the grammatical gender, speakers form mental representations of gender (Granham et al., 2012). Unlike Chinese and English, some other languages are grammatically gender-marked. This article will converge on gender stereotypical representations in French and German, providing some observable examples.

The presence of gender syncretism in French has been heatedly debated in the current century. Feminists argued that grammatical features and syntactic rules in contemporary French retain masculinity unnecessarily have a higher priority over femininity, reflecting and immortalising gender inequities in reality (Bullock, 2001). Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) is often considered a modern sociological ascription of gender or feminist studies. She provided an example of gender syncretism: the masculine personal pronoun ‘he’ is il in French. When stating a neutral position of events like ‘it is raining’ (il pluie) or ‘it is cold’ (il fait froid), the masculine form il would be used to refer to ‘it’. In this case, the masculine intensifies an unmarked ‘default position’ and norm, while female and feminine are entailed as an exception and an ‘aberration’ (Halewood, 2020).

Another example is that the personal pronoun ‘they’ could be ils and elles, depending on all the members are men or women, respectively. However, when there are mixed members of genders, the masculine ils would be used, functioning as an ‘invariant and indefinite plural form’ (Bullock, 2001). This feature could be a piece of evidence that masculine could erase feminine in plural contexts in French, in which the role of elles in a discourse is only to specify femininity. Objections are backed by the idea that the elimination of elles leads to the simplification of grammar. Additionally, Cohen (1927) discovered that there are more gender categories in singular than plural. These arguments were weakened by the fact that the selection of elles could likewise reduce pronominal variation. Observed from job titles, the default noun for a profession such as a doctor (le médecin) takes the masculine form, and the realm of medicine (la médicine) takes the feminine (Irigaray, 1993). It denotes that femininity might further embody abstract concepts.

In German, the suffix -in is added to represent female in role names. The plural form of male role names can, in some cases, be identical to its singular form. For instance, the nominative form of ‘the artists’ (die Künstler), representing male artists or a group of artists with mixed genders, has the same morphological form as ‘the artist’ (der Künstler), excluding the determiner ‘the’ (die/der). The female suffix -in and the female plural suffix -nen are inserted to represent the female artists (die Künstlerinnen). This example exhibits that feminine is more marked in the German language, containing a gender suffix that masculine lacks. The generic use of masculine form in the plural is also being discussed. Surprisingly, scholars noticed a male bias for interpreting singular GM (masculine-as-generic) utterances but a female bias for the plural GM utterances. Rothermund (2004) suggested the plural determiner (die) and pronoun (sie), both of which have the identical morphological form as the feminine singular, work against the male associations evoked by male role names. The notion was later further proved by empirical experiments conducted by Granham et al. (2012).

Some commented that gender representation is a ‘syntactic phenomenon’, not vacating ‘semantic or pragmatic considerations’ (Bullock, 2001), leading to a discussion on semantic agreement versus varied syntactic choices. Given the current primary research findings on the topic, comparisons between non-gender-marked Chinese and other gender-marked languages are not sufficient. Also, most empirical research has only relatively small sample sizes (n<150) and lacks controls on a cultural or socio-economic level. The possible modifications of linguistic behaviours might hinder the accuracy of the results. Participants who are aware of the experiments may produce premeditated speech and gender processing. Besides, whether speakers would base not so much on the stereotypical information when constructing gender representations due to grammatical cues in gender-marked languages requires further examination. The reasons behind the dominance of masculine still lack an adequate linguistic explanation.

As Irigaray (1993, p.20) had made clear, ‘sexual difference cannot be reduced to a simple extralinguistic fact of nature. It conditions language and is conditioned by it’. As time goes by, transgender and diverse gendered individuals have been of huge concerns. A current example is using the personal pronoun ‘they’ for individuals whose gender or sex is unclearly defined. Whether infinite neologisms could amply resolve the dispute remains unknown—criticisms asserting that the approach is prescriptive and with political correctness (Halewood, 2020). These all are of tremendous subjectivity. Nevertheless, altering the language alone is far from sufficient. The complex relations between languages, culture, history, and the world, plus the dichotomy in genders and sexes, are yet to be re-examined.

References

Bullock, B. (2001). On the Use of ils for elles: Gender Syncretism in the History of French. The French Review, 74(4), 700-709.

Cohen, M. (1927). A propos de la troisieme personne du féminin au pluriel. Bulletin de la So- ciete Linguistique de Paris, 26, 201-208.

De Beauvoir, S. (1949). Le deuxième sexe [The Second Sex]. Gallimard.

Garnham, A., Gabriel U., Sarrasin O., Gygax P. & Oakhill J. (2012). Gender Representation in Different Languages and Grammatical Marking on Pronouns: When Beauticians, Musicians, and Mechanics Remain Men. Discourse Processes, 49(6), 481-500.

Halewood, M. (2020). Gender and Personal Pronouns: She, He, It and They. Language and Process: Words, Whitehead and the World, 110-134. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Irigaray, L. (1993). Je, tu, nous. Toward a Culture of Difference. London: Routledge.

Rothmund, J., & Scheele, B. (2004). Personenbezeichnungsmodelle auf dem prüfstand: Lösung- smöglichkeiten für das genus-sexus-problem auf textebene [Putting gender-neutral reference terms to the test: Constructive solutions to the problem of grammatical versus referential gender on the textual level]. Zeitschrift Für Psychologie, 21, 40–54.