This conversation is closed. Start a new conversation
or join one »
He, she or s/he? Should languages be made gender neutral or be left on their own to preserve literary integrity?
My wife hates to be called an actress. She prefers ‘actor’ despite being reminded that semantically actor is not a gender neutral word. She maintains that words like author, actor, and doctor stress primarily on profession not gender.
I have a sneaking feeling she is feminist.
Feminists have long argued that sexist language can have real world consequences for gender relations and the relative status of men and women, and recent research suggests that grammatical gender can shape how people interpret the world around them along gender lines.
But language is as much a communication tool as literature. Some argue that steward and stewardess are distinct but equal terms and dropping one for another takes away the beauty of literary expression.
Interestingly there are a number of genderless languages, genderless in the less that these have no grammatical gender but have specific words to recognize gender. There are also natural gender languages which have evolved through a constant process on conscious neutralization of grammatical genders.
Things start to get serious when studies of Jennifer L. Prewitt-Freilino, T. Andrew Caswell and Emmi K. Laakso on the gendering of languages come to fore where after investigating 111 languages of the world their findings suggest that countries where gendered languages are spoken evidence less gender equality compared to countries with other grammatical gender systems. Furthermore, countries where natural gender languages are spoken demonstrate greater gender equality, which may be due to the ease of creating gender symmetric revisions to instances of sexist language.
Norway and Sweden show Global Gender Gap Indices of .82 and .81 (1 being ideally gender equal) and both these countries have natural gender languages. Yemen scores a GGG index of .46 with a gendered language.
Do you agree with this co-relation?
Closing Statement from Pabitra Mukhopadhyay
If language is supposed to be anything that reflects human consciousness, it needs to account for the discrimination towards women at one point or other. Societies may work consciously to change it towards gender neutrality or simply gender neutrality should impact it in meaningful ways. It may not be conclusive at this stage what changes what but this discussion leaves ample indications that it may not be wise just to ignore it.
Arnoldo De la Torre
Steve C
However, that was a one-person-at-a-time restroom, so no one had to wonder about who else was in there.
Steve C
Why, if Feminists are up in arms about "sexist language," do they still cling to the word 'feminism'? The word itself divides by gender.
As long as there's an important difference, there should be different words, otherwise the only words we'd need would be "schwa," and a few varying punctuation marks.
Edit: Wow, 5 days and no one jumped on me!
Anyways, 1/2 hour after I posted, I realized my mistake, (but I figured I'd give people time to catch it); "The word itself divides by gender," beacause "there's an important difference."
This seems to be a slippery slope, and will need some more thought. Thank you for your patient help.
David McDonald
Hogan Rogers
When religion forces language to mention female as lesser of the species and especially in Islam where two votes counts for one; inheritance to siblings is divided as one portion to male and half portion to female.
So how can language survive the scrutiny and enforcement of religion where it has such major impacts on it.
Gender equality in language can not prevail.
Uri Kanter
Manish Kumar Aggarwal
Scott Armstrong 50+
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
Lewis Smart 20+
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
We see men and women as different and distinct. That is a biological truth. Socially, however, seeing such difference/distinction runs the risk of discrimination towards one, and I contend women. Sexist language is one expression of that risk. For English, sociolinguistically, there are clear expressions of discrimination towards women in as much as the language statistically exhibits more references of women as inferior to men than contrary.
I would have been happy if I could see 'sexual distinction' in English as simplistically as Paul Lillebo did. Unfortunately, I see it right from the morphology of the language. Morpheme prefixes and suffixes such as -ess or -ette are used to derive feminine genders of words which enjoy the right to own the context with masculine bias. This reinforces my belief that linguistic expression of English language attests the biologically unfounded belief : women came from men or derived from men.
Interestingly such derived feminine gendered words, by rule, do not imply just a difference and therefore equality. Semantically, the gendered pair words Master - Mistress, Governor - Governess, Call boy - Call girl are not of equal social meaning. I hope one will not dispute the degeneration of social class and importance of the feminine gender in each case.
Even Man and Woman are not equal in meaning. I bid you to check the dictionaries to confirm the higher, broader and more powerful connotations of the word 'Man' compared to 'Woman'. If this is not bias, I don't know what is.
Paul Lillebo
About your presumably non-simplistic recitation above, you say that the fact that the terms "Man and Woman are not equal in meaning," with "more powerful connotations of the word Man," shows conclusively that this is a result of bias. ("If this is not bias, I don't know what is.") But you haven't at all proved that these differences are the result of bias, only that they are different. The reason could perhaps be bias, but it could as well be experience and assessment. What investigations have you done to show that the uses of the words, over thousands of years, are not based on experience rather than simply bias?
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
I am sorry if you didn't like my assessment of your argument as 'simplistic'. I would humbly draw your attention to the fact that here in TED there is provision for such assessment by anybody by way of clicking 'Thumbs up (Well argued!)', so I have not breached any any code of conduct, I suppose. I respect your contribution but like every one retain the right to assess it too. Kindly do not take it as anything personal.
I am also sorry that you express your inability to elucidate the biological basis of your assertion, despite declaring your authority as a biologist. I am not one but love the subject and consider myself a student of it.
As regards my investigation, I am also limited by character limitation here. But for you and anyone interested I propose an easy enough test. Take four authentic dictionaries like Merriam-Webster, Oxford, Cambridge and Macmillan; look up 'Man', count the contextual meanings (definitions) including idioms and note. Do the same exercise for 'Woman'. Compare.
I find it very difficult to accept 'man' as representing human race on the basis of experience.
Paul Lillebo
1. Professions: As Pabitra said, "stewardess" is an example. German and French commonly use such gender designations. In English this is less common ("teacher" for both sexes), and many of these distinctions have disappeared. The suffix "-man" is a problem for some, though others take it simply as an "agent" designator without a gender implication. The usual replacement suffix, "-person" leads to some clumsier words, e.g., chairperson, fireperson, policeperson and foreperson. Many have turned to just "chair" or to "fire fighter" and "police officer," though "foreman" seems to be holding its own, as do "airman" and "seaman" in the Air Force and Navy. (Jokes are made about needing to switch to "woperson" and "huperson.") By the way, most hostesses and actresses don't seem interested in any change.
2. Gendering of nouns: English doesn't use this, though most European languages do. Norwegian has 2 grammatical genders (common and neuter), but these have no relation to sexes of the objects spoken of. Thus man, woman, boy, girl, etc. are all treated the same grammatically. (Remnants of a feminine gender that existed earlier are still found in colloquial speech.) I see no hope of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. ridding their nouns of gender any time soon.
3. Perhaps the most productive target for those who are anxious to degenderize language lies in our pronouns. In English, for example, if we want to say, "When a person has a fever, __ feels bad." it has been common to fill in the blank with "he." This was long accepted as meaning "he or she," but is less accepted today. Replacements involve "he/she" or switching to plural and writing "they." The problem is easily solved by creating a new inclusive pronoun for this case.
( I'm running out of space so I invite you to check my note about this, written nine years ago, on my web site Blue Ridge Journal: http://www.blueridgejournal.com/brj-genderlang.htm )
walter crockett
caersith persoana
For those of you who are feminist, instead of calling an actress an actor. Why not calling an actor an actress?
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
I am least perturbed to admit that I have stopped living my life solely on reason and logic. I put this debate to resolve a personal dilemma. In one part I think language should change to appreciate and express the social changes - gender equality in this case. In another part I shall miss words and usages that make me inspired to be a literary artist.
I am possibly seeing the ray of hope, still a feeling basically, that the change may bring new beauty.
If you give me good enough reward and respect for acting, I have no, repeat NO, problem to be called an actress. And i am no feminist.
Cheers!!
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
Seamus McGrenery
But, there is often a 'but', and here it is.
We live in a complex real world not in an isolated social experiment. Idea's can be transmitted quickly around the world, but their implementation in different settings can have unintended results.
A little example: There is a growing body of thought, from the fields of psychology and linguistics, that it is more important to praise children for effort rather than result.
The Walt Disney Company have tried to implement these ideas i some of their childrens TV shows. So the animated character Special Agent OSO gives digital medals to the audience and thanks them for their hard work. So children get the message that sitting watching TV is hard work.
The point I am trying to make is that it is not easy to make positive social changes. Of there is always resistance to change, usually from the people who are favored by the current situation. But also it is pretty difficult to see how the change will play out as it starts to be implemented.
And mono-culture may seem a safer alternative to many people.
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
It will be rather silly to argue that we depend on languages to understand the difference between male and female - biological evolution takes over much before the linguistic expression can start to mean anything to us. I think higher primates understand the difference quite functionally in the survival race. Its seems to me that femininity and masculinity are contrived ideas of societies that result from gendered words and their usage.
Virtues are traditionally attached to femininity and masculinity such that tenderness, beauty, grace, kindness are attached to one and roughness, power, speed and intellect to another. Our whole literature attested this difference for centuries. Why that has to be like this for ever, I wonder.
Paul Lillebo
The inborn differences in behavior result partly from the genetic program of hormone production during a lifetime, which functions to assure reproduction and care of the young. If we decide to try to change the natural behavior patterns, fine, but let's start by acknowledging that that is what we are doing. Denying the natural differences between the sexes is a silly starting point.
(If we want to be real sure, we can look further at the behavior of other higher animals, and see whether any differences between the sexes are natural or cultural. Look at birds and their mating and nesting behavior. Look at deer. And does a bull behave like a cow? A rooster like a hen? And are these cultural?)
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
Human societies have no parallel in the animal world. There are some rudimentary social behavior in some animals but nothing comparable in the scale and depth as that of human societies. So any biological logic can hardly extend up to human social traits and let us see language as one of those traits.
I have maintained that gender and sex are not equal descriptions of reality. I'd argue that concepts of masculinity and femininity are not appropriate descriptions of sexes or genders either. These are way deeper than behavior and biological differences. For example when we say 'be a man' we do not necessarily doubt his anatomy.
We show a bias ascribing qualities like tenderness, beauty, shyness, modesty, lack of aggressiveness and power to femininity and roughness, courage, outspokenness, brazenness, aggression and brute power to masculinity. This bias is reflected in our languages and attested by our literature. There is no biological basis to this bias. So I think the ideas are contrived.
Do you behave like me? If not, do we need different genders?
Paul Lillebo
With education in anthropology and evolutionary biology one recognizes that human societies have very deep parallels with the animal world. The genetic imprint of our distant ancestors, long before the rise of the human species, is still actively operating in our DNA. One cannot deny this, though one can be unaware of it.
As to "biases," no one who has experience with life really believes that men are not often tender, shy, retiring, afraid, or introverted, or that women are not often aggressive, rough, crude, and lusting for power. There is clearly not an either-or distribution of such features between the sexes. This is known to everyone. But so is the existence of certain sexual ideals, which of course not everyone shares. The publishers of "women's magazines" and "men's magazines" have pretty well figured out what sells. You might take a look at some of these for a clue about majoritarian sexual-selection ideals. You'll find a remarkable consistency about the male ideal in the women's magazines, and vice versa. Here again, biology rules. It's the same thing as the female bird selecting her mate on the basis of ideal male sexual characteristics - often species-specific desirable colors or form of the plumage. In mammals, male power and ability to protect the female and the young have been common selection criteria, as they still are in humans. (No surprise here.) Sexual ideals and selection have been key factors in the evolutionary development of the higher animal species, including Homo sapiens. We are not as free of our genetic lineage as you might think. Check out a course in evolutionary human biology; it's fascinating.
Paul L.
Biologist
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
I don't think there is any animal other than humans who use female beauty, fragility, desirability and male power, smartness and aggression as statements in contexts different from biological evolution. Check the media and advertisements, if literature is too huge a reference.
Additionally, since you are a biologist, kindly enlighten me with the examples of species (other than humans) who select sexual partners on the basis of color of hair, a given body shape (different from genitalia), intelligence and emotional make up.
Paul Lillebo
arun naina
Gender itself is really just a mix of personality traits that are linked to the reproductive role of that organism. The problem with us is that, in relations to gender, is that we always attempt to stuff 7 billion people into just two of them, even though the variety of 'genders' increases every day.
Variety is hard/scary to deal with, so it's much easier to place everyone into two 'roles' and expect them to act accordingly. Are you a big, muscular woman? Are you a short, skinny male? Do you act according to what your culture dictates for your sex? Does your sexuality match the preferred norm? It doesn't matter who or what you actually are, because at the end you're still just 'he' or 'she', and those two terms invoke certain connotations that are 'expected' to be acknowledged and conformed to, or in the case of a reader of the terms, invoke a certain image.
That is the real debate. Conformity and codependency to a term that's used to describe oneself, even though the definition of it might hardly be 'you' in reality. You also see great amounts of anger when males are females are considered with more equal terms, usually from the male population.
Why does it matter whether I know the sex of the person delivering my mail? The only thing in your body that cares is the sexual reproductive parts of it. That's the part of human beings that actually wants gender language to remain in place.
The languages that assign genders to items illustrates this all that well. They have set connotations/expectations for males/females and assign those attributes to items that they feel mimic them. Why? Because that's the only way in which they can (currently) think - with stereotypes.
Replace the word "gender" with "personality" and you start to see how silly it
Seamus McGrenery
For example see Keith Chen's talk 'Could your language affect your ability to save money?'
http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_affect_your_ability_to_save_money.html
There are other folklore examples which seem to make similar connections between language and identity. In Europe we tend to associate cultures which have 'Romance languages' (e.g. French, Italian) with being more 'romantic' than those which have Germanic languages.
So as our culture changes it makes sense that our language should change with it. Personally I would not like to see all language differences disappear.
A social mono-culture could be as risky as an agricultural one.
arun naina
In other words, human beings start dividing themselves in other ways, outside of what's simply between their legs. You foster variety rather than stifle it (as how it mostly is now, especially in the poorer/more war-driven countries).
Cosmin Atanasiu
If your first language is a gender indifferent language you may never truly understand a language which differentiates between genders, but it has very little (if anything) to do with sexism and gender bias. But as an english speaking person, to refer to an economy as "she" is very uncomfortable, of course. It is definitely not the same in gender differentiating languages
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
The meaning of words seem to take on special significance in contexts. So it appears very plausible for me in a society that truly does not see the equality of genders can use gendered words to achieve sexist expressions. If I am not very wrong 'bitch' in English is semantically way more charged than a meaning 'female dog'.
I don't think people just decide get biased about a word like 'actress' (particularly one who follows the profession of acting) but they rather get wary of such references on account of more uses of that word in contexts which are demeaning, disrespectful or casual than otherwise.
I am not a professional linguist. But I think there is no such language as gender indifferent. There are languages which are grammatically gendered or there are languages that have no grammatical gender at all. The grammatically genderless languages are likely to have lesser discriminating contexts along anatomical differences between male and female.
It looks logically possible to me that the societies that for centuries are trying to bridge the gender gaps on social indices must have tell-tale effects on the language for conscious gender neutralization. At least, such societies are less likely to accept sexism with any degree of fondness.
DG Fletcher
I like English because it lets you (mostly) pick your battles. Sibling is useful but a little generic. "Sister" or "brother" actually relevant sometimes. I sometimes wish we had a gender-specific word for cousins. "Actor" not as relevant. "Doctor" Not relevant at all.
In case you haven't noticed... I avoided stating a gender either direction. :D
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
Obey No1kinobe 50+
But leave existing literature as it is.
Language is powerful in how it limits or empowers us and the influences the way we think.
It may be a factor in the Nordic countries, or did the Language reflect a preexisting bias? But I suggest there is more to it than just language.
I note New Zealand was also one of the first countries to give women the vote, and English is the dominant language.
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
Obey No1kinobe 50+
With respect I suggest underlying Maori culture had very little to do with the movement in NZ to get the vote for women.
Maori culture was not that influential 100+ years ago. It probably has minimal impact on those of European decent even today.
Interesting that Maori language has gender neutral pronouns.
I note the bible reinforces wo Man - women made from men in genesis 2. But not in genesis one when is says they were created at the same time.
Andrew Breen
mary kariuki
Personally, I think whether we maintain the status quo or we change to S/he..it does not matter. But I would prefer the former....I don't want to start writing S/he then his/her, and yes I love with country is referred as "her" steady economic growth".....
James Cline
Rick Schrager
Language is the artistic medium for each and everyone of us. We paint our experiences using a palette of words.
Let's not start eating our crayons lest our images become too monotone.
Andrew Breen
Is it possible it's more a culturally conditioned issue than a condition of gendered language? Does language influence culture or did culture influence language? It would take a very cleverly designed study to parse the distinction, I'm thinking a retrospective cross cultural meta analysis of the etiology of modern languages for several countries with disparate gender equalities. The control would have to be from a language which developed in a country where there has been equality from the beginning. A huge undertaking.
Juliette Zahn 50+
Andrew Breen
Juliette Zahn 50+
"There is already a people who are gender neutral regarding words...they are in Zaire, Africa: Mbuti tribe ....The Mbuti tribe only have one word for elder,peer and child." This next part shows they are really smart: " They advocate competition as unacceptable as it isolates the winner and saddens the losers "
5 Languages spoken in Zaire: French, Lingala · Kongo, Swahili · Tshiluba
A sample of the language is:
Bantu bonsu badi baledibwa badikadile ne badi ne makokeshi amwe. Badi ne lungenyi lwa bumuntu ne kondo ka moyo, badi ne bwa kwenzelangana malu mu buwetu.
" All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. "
Beautiful !!
Andrew Breen
Juliette Zahn 50+
" All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of _______________ - (Insert your better / best word?)
I do like camaraderie...
carolyn mcauley 10+
Grace Greene 10+
have you seen the TED talk where a linguist discovered a correlation between savings rates in countries with a language that use a future tense and those countries with languages that don't have them. i.e. Some languages say "It will rain tomorrow" whereas others say "It rain tomorrow". Those persons speaking languages that do not include a future tense have far higher savings rates than those who use languages such as English.
Words are powerful unto themselves. Words have meanings. If there is no word to convey meaning, then people are harmed. Such as women in situations where gender is meaningless but used as a weapon anyhow.
Pabitra Mukhopadhyay 30+
I think there is a lack of understanding regrading how a conscious gender neutralization works on a language. Such processes are not disruptive but incremental and works over huge spans of time, even centuries. I think such long and deep process cannot possibly be academic experiments but rather manifestation of societies' urge to shake free from gender discrimination. If English is not sufficiently gender neutral even today it might mean lack of true will by societies/countries to see women as equal where the language is spoken natively.
I am not very fond of so called feminism which appears to seek special attention to women rather than true equality and I like women being different from men. I mean steward and stewardess are equal words - but what is the stress here? On stewardship or the gender of the person?