Most people believe that the English language doesn't have genders. But is this really true?
Why do some languages have genders while others don't, where do these genders come from, and how does having genders in language impact society?
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are discussing genders.
[00:00:25] But not whether a person is a man, a woman, or another gender, or what pronouns one should use.
[00:00:32] But rather, genders in language, and specifically, we will focus on genders in the English language.
[00:00:40] 38% of the world speak a gendered language, meaning they group nouns into categories like masculine, feminine and neuter.
[00:00:50] English is something called a “natural gender language”, meaning that pronouns - he, she, and so on - do have a gender, but objects do not. A chair is a chair, it isn’t masculine, it isn’t feminine, it’s just a chair.
[00:01:05] So why is this?
[00:01:07] Why do most European languages give inanimate objects genders, but English does not?
[00:01:14] Has this always been the case?
[00:01:15] And is it really true that there are no genders in English?
[00:01:21] Let’s get right into it and explore the surprising story behind genders in the English language.
[00:01:29] When speaking about the German language, the American author Mark Twain once said:
[00:01:36] “Every noun has a gender, there is no sense or system in distribution.”
[00:01:42] “In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence, [or great love] that shows for the turnip, and what disrespect for the girl.”
[00:01:57] Here, Twain humorously voices his frustration at trying to understand the German language and its seemingly random categorisation of words.
[00:02:08] As our German listeners will know, the German language has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter, or neutral.
[00:02:17] The word for a ‘girl’ is neuter, while the word for ‘turnip’ is feminine.
[00:02:24] And Twain points out how strange this is, at least for an English-speaker, for a speaker of a language without grammatical genders.
[00:02:34] Why should a turnip have a gender and a girl have none?
[00:02:39] A girl is clearly feminine, and a turnip is, well, it’s a vegetable, it’s neither feminine nor masculine in terms of its gender.
[00:02:49] Twain isn’t alone in being baffled, being confused, by this concept.
[00:02:55] It’s a challenging one for anyone learning a new language, especially if their native language is a grammatically non-gendered one, like English.
[00:03:06] On the flip side, on the other hand, it can make English easier to learn than languages that do have grammatical genders, because you almost never need to worry about remembering what gender an object is in English.
[00:03:21] There are a few exceptions, which we’ll touch on shortly, but as a general rule, you don’t need to worry about whether a turnip is masculine, feminine, or something else. Or a tomato.
[00:03:35] Or a potato.
[00:03:35] Or a TV or a chair or a table. Or any object.
[00:03:40] As you’ll know, non-human objects in English don’t have a gender, which makes life easy.
[00:03:48] So, why is this, why do some languages have grammatical genders, and why is English not one of them?
[00:03:57] Well, we need to start by addressing the first question, of why some languages have genders, before we can get to the specific question of English.
[00:04:09] The first point to underline is that it helps to try to mentally separate the idea of grammatical gender from physical gender, and instead, to think of grammatical gender more like a category, or a way of putting different types of words in different types of boxes, a way of organising language.
[00:04:32] Linguists believe that many gendered languages stem from Proto-Indo-European, a language which existed around 6000 years ago.
[00:04:43] This was the ancestor of European languages and Western and Southern Asian languages such as Hindi, Bengali or Kurdish.
[00:04:52] And Proto-Indo-European categorised nouns into two groups: a group for animate or living things and a group for inanimate things, or objects.
[00:05:07] But over thousands of years many new languages evolved and the categories for words changed, becoming far more varied.
[00:05:18] Words that had been classed merely as inanimate in Proto-Indo-European eventually became either masculine,
[00:05:26] feminine or
[00:05:27] neuter.
[00:05:28] Why?
[00:05:30] Well, linguists believe that the reason for these changes in language can be attributed to the various belief systems of countries affecting how they thought about objects.
[00:05:42] For instance, in the Siberian language Ket, masculine words are often items actually related to the culture’s male-dominated activities like hunting and building.
[00:05:55] For instance, their words for fish and wood are both masculine.
[00:06:02] Meanwhile, words for more domestic things such as illnesses, body parts and plants are often feminine, reflecting women’s position that particular society.
[00:06:15] So, while these inanimate objects don’t, of course, have a gender, in their language their gender corresponds to the real-life people most associated with them.
[00:06:27] And the influence of real-life gender is also present in the Alamblak language of Papua New Guinea.
[00:06:34] In Alamblak, many masculine nouns include the words for snakes, arrows, and trees, long straight shapes.
[00:06:44] I’ll leave you guess why that one might be.
[00:06:48] These examples show how cultural beliefs can affect language and the ways we think and interact with words.
[00:06:56] And linguists believe that this sort of thing happening over many thousands of years slowly led to the evolution of European languages and their gender categories.
[00:07:08] But as any speaker of Spanish, German, French, Italian, or any other European gendered language will know, these cultural influences are often long gone.
[00:07:21] To go back to our example from Mark Twain, a turnip is feminine in German. It’s also feminine in Italian, “la rapa”. But it’s masculine in French [“le navet”] and in Spanish [“el nabo”].
[00:07:38] If there’s a cultural reason why a turnip should be feminine in German and Italian but masuline in French and Spanish, well, I have yet to find it.
[00:07:49] Instead, words tend to be categorised phonetically, words which sound the same can be distinguished by their different genders.
[00:07:59] If we use the example of French or Italian, similar-sounding words often have the same gender.
[00:08:07] In French, for example, words ending in things like "ant" tend to be masculine, whereas words ending in -asse, -ace, or -esse tend to be feminine.
[00:08:20] And in Italian, words ending in an “o” tend to be masculine and words ending in an “ a” tend to be feminine.
[00:08:29] But these are guidelines more than surefire certain rules, as any frustrated French or Italian learner will know all too well.
[00:08:40] Interestingly enough, some studies suggest that grammatical genders do actually make it quicker and easier for people to understand information.
[00:08:49] In other words, gender in language can give clues to your brain that help it retrieve information faster.
[00:08:58] For example, I’m sure you’ve had that annoying, niggling, feeling when you can’t quite remember the correct word to describe what you mean.
[00:09:07] Well, linguists propose that grammatical gender can actually help to eliminate this, with the grammatical gender providing clues to your brain to help you retrieve a word.
[00:09:19] This is, of course, only one theory, and there’s an equally valid argument to be made that genders in language make it more complicated to learn a language.
[00:09:30] After all, the most successful artificial language in history, Esperanto, completely avoided gendered language altogether, with its creator believing that any benefits that gender might have once you had learned the language were outweighed by the additional mental energy required to learn these genders in the first place.
[00:09:51] So, this brings us to English, a non-gendered language.
[00:09:57] Why doesn’t it have grammatical genders, especially considering that there is so much European influence in the language?
[00:10:05] Well, it hasn’t always been this way.
[00:10:08] It might surprise you to find out that up until the 11th century or so, English did have grammatical genders.
[00:10:18] Old English, or Anglo Saxon, had genders, every object was either masculine, feminine or neutral.
[00:10:26] This language had been brought to the British Isles by the Saxons, who came from Northern Europe in the fourth century AD.
[00:10:35] After they settled in the South of England, Anglo Saxon quickly became the dominant language spoken in the British Isles, so most people in Britain were speaking using grammatical gender.
[00:10:48] But just as one group of Northern European invaders brought genders with them, another group of Northern Europeans appeared several centuries later, and unintentionally wiped out the existence of genders in English.
[00:11:04] These were the Vikings.
[00:11:07] Now, you probably know the Vikings as fearsome warriors, bringing with them a reign of terror.
[00:11:14] But they also brought with them their language, Old Norse, when they started to settle in Britain in the late ninth century.
[00:11:23] Old Norse, like Anglo Saxon, did have genders.
[00:11:27] It had masculine, feminine and neuter.
[00:11:30] The problem was that the genders given to objects weren’t always the same in the two languages.
[00:11:36] A turnip might have been feminine in Old English but masculine or neuter in Old Norse.
[00:11:44] Clearly, this made life confusing.
[00:11:47] So, over time, people in Northern England, where the Vikings first landed, started to leave out the gendered parts of their language.
[00:11:57] And this trend slowly travelled down to the Anglo-Saxon south of England, and by the 11th century grammatical genders in English had, by and large, disappeared.
[00:12:09] A turnip became just a turnip.
[00:12:13] But there are some exceptions, some objects still do have genders in English, or at least, semi-genders.
[00:12:22] Now, this is not something you would learn in an English class, but it’s interesting.
[00:12:27] And this is the concept of metaphorical gender.
[00:12:32] For example, boats are often referred to as “she”, they are feminine.
[00:12:39] If you were talking about the Titanic, let’s say, you could say “she set sail to America”. You could also say “it set sail for America”, which wouldn’t be completely wrong, but it would sound very strange to say “he set sail for America”.
[00:12:55] So, a boat is either "it" or it's "she", it's never “he”.
[00:13:00] Interestingly enough, one theory about why this is, at least in the case of boats, is that it comes from the Latin word for boat, navis, which is feminine.
[00:13:12] Another is that there is this idea of a boat having a protective, maternal role for its crew, or rather, her crew, and that’s why boats are often given a gender.
[00:13:25] By the way, it’s not wrong at all to call a boat simply “it”, and indeed the Lloyds Register of Shipping, which knows a thing or two about boats, calls a ship “it”.
[00:13:37] And it’s not just ships that get given genders in English.
[00:13:41] Cars and machines are often feminine in English, but typically only when the person talking about them has some kind of close relationship with them.
[00:13:52] All that being said, this is a pretty niche, unusual, way of speaking, so for all intents and purposes, it is safe to assume that there are no genders used to describe objects in English.
[00:14:07] There are, of course, still gendered terms used to describe people.
[00:14:12] Now, this is perhaps controversial territory we’re getting into here, but the English language historically has male and female pronouns that are used to describe people - he/him, and she/her, with the third person plural, they, being used when the gender of a person is unspecified or unknown.
[00:14:36] And in English, nouns describing the job someone does have historically been slightly different depending on that person's gender.
[00:14:46] Headmaster or Headmistress.
[00:14:48] Policeman or Policewoman.
[00:14:51] Actor or Actress.
[00:14:53] Waiter or Waitress.
[00:14:55] In most cases, the male variant is the dominant one, and the female version is an alternative.
[00:15:04] Clearly, this is problematic. If a young girl only hears about policemen, or firemen, or postmen or businessmen, or even if a young boy hears these terms as standard, it suggests that these are things that can only be done by men.
[00:15:24] Over the past few decades, there has been a move to try to standardise these terms in English, to try to create more inclusive language.
[00:15:34] In some cases, the male variant is chosen as the standard, so there are, for example, no longer actors and actresses, simply “actors”.
[00:15:46] In other cases, a new, non-gendered term is chosen, so there aren’t Policemen and Policewomen, but rather police officers.
[00:15:56] All good so far.
[00:15:58] Perhaps even more strangely, in American English a decision has been taken to change the Spanish language, when used in English, so someone is no longer Latino or Latina, they are Latinx.
[00:16:14] The idea of creating an inclusive term does, it appears, come from a place of good intentions.
[00:16:21] But this particular example of “Latinx” has largely been ridiculed by the Hispanic population. Only 2-3% of Hispanic people reportedly use the term to describe themselves, and it has been criticised as an example of linguistic imperialism, of non-Spanish-speaking Americans changing Spanish to solve a non-existent problem.
[00:16:47] And as to the question of what is the effect of a language having grammatical gender or not, and what is the effect of English having gendered pronouns but not grammatical gender, well this is a tricky one.
[00:17:03] There was a prominent study from 2011 that looked at gender equality in 111 different countries and found that countries where gendered languages were spoken tended to have lower levels of gender equality.
[00:17:18] So, if you live in a country that assigns genders to objects, you are more likely to experience gender inequality.
[00:17:27] You might think, well, if that’s the case, then presumably countries with no gender in their language would be beacons of gender equality, would be great places in terms of equality between men and women.
[00:17:42] Some, Finland, for example, score very highly on this count. Finnish is a language without any genders, neither grammatical nor in personal pronouns, and Finland is a country with high levels of gender equality.
[00:17:59] Others, Cameroon, China and Turkey, for example, do not. These countries don’t use gendered language, but they don’t score very well in terms of gender equality.
[00:18:12] Interestingly, countries where Natural Gender languages like English are spoken, where pronouns have gender but objects do not, score highest overall, they are generally the best places in terms of gender equality.
[00:18:27] Clearly, the language spoken in the country is only one factor here, but it is certainly an interesting piece of research, and shows that even if your language has no inbuilt gender inequality, it certainly doesn’t mean that this will be the case for your society.
[00:18:46] So, what does this all mean for English learners?
[00:18:50] Well, not a lot, really..
[00:18:52] The good news for you is that grammatical gender is one less thing you need to worry about.
[00:18:58] When you talk about a turnip, call it it.
[00:19:02] When you talk about a chair, call it “it” too.
[00:19:06] And when you’re talking about a boat, well the truth is that you can call it “it” as well.
[00:19:14] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on gender in language, and in particular, gender in English.
[00:19:22] I hope it was an interesting one, and that it might have left you thinking a bit about your native language.
[00:19:28] Did you grow up speaking a grammatically gendered language like French or Spanish, a non-gendered language like Turkish or Mandarin, or a naturally gendered language like English, Danish or Swedish?
[00:19:42] How do you think this affected you, and the society you grew up in?
[00:19:47] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:51] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:59] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are discussing genders.
[00:00:25] But not whether a person is a man, a woman, or another gender, or what pronouns one should use.
[00:00:32] But rather, genders in language, and specifically, we will focus on genders in the English language.
[00:00:40] 38% of the world speak a gendered language, meaning they group nouns into categories like masculine, feminine and neuter.
[00:00:50] English is something called a “natural gender language”, meaning that pronouns - he, she, and so on - do have a gender, but objects do not. A chair is a chair, it isn’t masculine, it isn’t feminine, it’s just a chair.
[00:01:05] So why is this?
[00:01:07] Why do most European languages give inanimate objects genders, but English does not?
[00:01:14] Has this always been the case?
[00:01:15] And is it really true that there are no genders in English?
[00:01:21] Let’s get right into it and explore the surprising story behind genders in the English language.
[00:01:29] When speaking about the German language, the American author Mark Twain once said:
[00:01:36] “Every noun has a gender, there is no sense or system in distribution.”
[00:01:42] “In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence, [or great love] that shows for the turnip, and what disrespect for the girl.”
[00:01:57] Here, Twain humorously voices his frustration at trying to understand the German language and its seemingly random categorisation of words.
[00:02:08] As our German listeners will know, the German language has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter, or neutral.
[00:02:17] The word for a ‘girl’ is neuter, while the word for ‘turnip’ is feminine.
[00:02:24] And Twain points out how strange this is, at least for an English-speaker, for a speaker of a language without grammatical genders.
[00:02:34] Why should a turnip have a gender and a girl have none?
[00:02:39] A girl is clearly feminine, and a turnip is, well, it’s a vegetable, it’s neither feminine nor masculine in terms of its gender.
[00:02:49] Twain isn’t alone in being baffled, being confused, by this concept.
[00:02:55] It’s a challenging one for anyone learning a new language, especially if their native language is a grammatically non-gendered one, like English.
[00:03:06] On the flip side, on the other hand, it can make English easier to learn than languages that do have grammatical genders, because you almost never need to worry about remembering what gender an object is in English.
[00:03:21] There are a few exceptions, which we’ll touch on shortly, but as a general rule, you don’t need to worry about whether a turnip is masculine, feminine, or something else. Or a tomato.
[00:03:35] Or a potato.
[00:03:35] Or a TV or a chair or a table. Or any object.
[00:03:40] As you’ll know, non-human objects in English don’t have a gender, which makes life easy.
[00:03:48] So, why is this, why do some languages have grammatical genders, and why is English not one of them?
[00:03:57] Well, we need to start by addressing the first question, of why some languages have genders, before we can get to the specific question of English.
[00:04:09] The first point to underline is that it helps to try to mentally separate the idea of grammatical gender from physical gender, and instead, to think of grammatical gender more like a category, or a way of putting different types of words in different types of boxes, a way of organising language.
[00:04:32] Linguists believe that many gendered languages stem from Proto-Indo-European, a language which existed around 6000 years ago.
[00:04:43] This was the ancestor of European languages and Western and Southern Asian languages such as Hindi, Bengali or Kurdish.
[00:04:52] And Proto-Indo-European categorised nouns into two groups: a group for animate or living things and a group for inanimate things, or objects.
[00:05:07] But over thousands of years many new languages evolved and the categories for words changed, becoming far more varied.
[00:05:18] Words that had been classed merely as inanimate in Proto-Indo-European eventually became either masculine,
[00:05:26] feminine or
[00:05:27] neuter.
[00:05:28] Why?
[00:05:30] Well, linguists believe that the reason for these changes in language can be attributed to the various belief systems of countries affecting how they thought about objects.
[00:05:42] For instance, in the Siberian language Ket, masculine words are often items actually related to the culture’s male-dominated activities like hunting and building.
[00:05:55] For instance, their words for fish and wood are both masculine.
[00:06:02] Meanwhile, words for more domestic things such as illnesses, body parts and plants are often feminine, reflecting women’s position that particular society.
[00:06:15] So, while these inanimate objects don’t, of course, have a gender, in their language their gender corresponds to the real-life people most associated with them.
[00:06:27] And the influence of real-life gender is also present in the Alamblak language of Papua New Guinea.
[00:06:34] In Alamblak, many masculine nouns include the words for snakes, arrows, and trees, long straight shapes.
[00:06:44] I’ll leave you guess why that one might be.
[00:06:48] These examples show how cultural beliefs can affect language and the ways we think and interact with words.
[00:06:56] And linguists believe that this sort of thing happening over many thousands of years slowly led to the evolution of European languages and their gender categories.
[00:07:08] But as any speaker of Spanish, German, French, Italian, or any other European gendered language will know, these cultural influences are often long gone.
[00:07:21] To go back to our example from Mark Twain, a turnip is feminine in German. It’s also feminine in Italian, “la rapa”. But it’s masculine in French [“le navet”] and in Spanish [“el nabo”].
[00:07:38] If there’s a cultural reason why a turnip should be feminine in German and Italian but masuline in French and Spanish, well, I have yet to find it.
[00:07:49] Instead, words tend to be categorised phonetically, words which sound the same can be distinguished by their different genders.
[00:07:59] If we use the example of French or Italian, similar-sounding words often have the same gender.
[00:08:07] In French, for example, words ending in things like "ant" tend to be masculine, whereas words ending in -asse, -ace, or -esse tend to be feminine.
[00:08:20] And in Italian, words ending in an “o” tend to be masculine and words ending in an “ a” tend to be feminine.
[00:08:29] But these are guidelines more than surefire certain rules, as any frustrated French or Italian learner will know all too well.
[00:08:40] Interestingly enough, some studies suggest that grammatical genders do actually make it quicker and easier for people to understand information.
[00:08:49] In other words, gender in language can give clues to your brain that help it retrieve information faster.
[00:08:58] For example, I’m sure you’ve had that annoying, niggling, feeling when you can’t quite remember the correct word to describe what you mean.
[00:09:07] Well, linguists propose that grammatical gender can actually help to eliminate this, with the grammatical gender providing clues to your brain to help you retrieve a word.
[00:09:19] This is, of course, only one theory, and there’s an equally valid argument to be made that genders in language make it more complicated to learn a language.
[00:09:30] After all, the most successful artificial language in history, Esperanto, completely avoided gendered language altogether, with its creator believing that any benefits that gender might have once you had learned the language were outweighed by the additional mental energy required to learn these genders in the first place.
[00:09:51] So, this brings us to English, a non-gendered language.
[00:09:57] Why doesn’t it have grammatical genders, especially considering that there is so much European influence in the language?
[00:10:05] Well, it hasn’t always been this way.
[00:10:08] It might surprise you to find out that up until the 11th century or so, English did have grammatical genders.
[00:10:18] Old English, or Anglo Saxon, had genders, every object was either masculine, feminine or neutral.
[00:10:26] This language had been brought to the British Isles by the Saxons, who came from Northern Europe in the fourth century AD.
[00:10:35] After they settled in the South of England, Anglo Saxon quickly became the dominant language spoken in the British Isles, so most people in Britain were speaking using grammatical gender.
[00:10:48] But just as one group of Northern European invaders brought genders with them, another group of Northern Europeans appeared several centuries later, and unintentionally wiped out the existence of genders in English.
[00:11:04] These were the Vikings.
[00:11:07] Now, you probably know the Vikings as fearsome warriors, bringing with them a reign of terror.
[00:11:14] But they also brought with them their language, Old Norse, when they started to settle in Britain in the late ninth century.
[00:11:23] Old Norse, like Anglo Saxon, did have genders.
[00:11:27] It had masculine, feminine and neuter.
[00:11:30] The problem was that the genders given to objects weren’t always the same in the two languages.
[00:11:36] A turnip might have been feminine in Old English but masculine or neuter in Old Norse.
[00:11:44] Clearly, this made life confusing.
[00:11:47] So, over time, people in Northern England, where the Vikings first landed, started to leave out the gendered parts of their language.
[00:11:57] And this trend slowly travelled down to the Anglo-Saxon south of England, and by the 11th century grammatical genders in English had, by and large, disappeared.
[00:12:09] A turnip became just a turnip.
[00:12:13] But there are some exceptions, some objects still do have genders in English, or at least, semi-genders.
[00:12:22] Now, this is not something you would learn in an English class, but it’s interesting.
[00:12:27] And this is the concept of metaphorical gender.
[00:12:32] For example, boats are often referred to as “she”, they are feminine.
[00:12:39] If you were talking about the Titanic, let’s say, you could say “she set sail to America”. You could also say “it set sail for America”, which wouldn’t be completely wrong, but it would sound very strange to say “he set sail for America”.
[00:12:55] So, a boat is either "it" or it's "she", it's never “he”.
[00:13:00] Interestingly enough, one theory about why this is, at least in the case of boats, is that it comes from the Latin word for boat, navis, which is feminine.
[00:13:12] Another is that there is this idea of a boat having a protective, maternal role for its crew, or rather, her crew, and that’s why boats are often given a gender.
[00:13:25] By the way, it’s not wrong at all to call a boat simply “it”, and indeed the Lloyds Register of Shipping, which knows a thing or two about boats, calls a ship “it”.
[00:13:37] And it’s not just ships that get given genders in English.
[00:13:41] Cars and machines are often feminine in English, but typically only when the person talking about them has some kind of close relationship with them.
[00:13:52] All that being said, this is a pretty niche, unusual, way of speaking, so for all intents and purposes, it is safe to assume that there are no genders used to describe objects in English.
[00:14:07] There are, of course, still gendered terms used to describe people.
[00:14:12] Now, this is perhaps controversial territory we’re getting into here, but the English language historically has male and female pronouns that are used to describe people - he/him, and she/her, with the third person plural, they, being used when the gender of a person is unspecified or unknown.
[00:14:36] And in English, nouns describing the job someone does have historically been slightly different depending on that person's gender.
[00:14:46] Headmaster or Headmistress.
[00:14:48] Policeman or Policewoman.
[00:14:51] Actor or Actress.
[00:14:53] Waiter or Waitress.
[00:14:55] In most cases, the male variant is the dominant one, and the female version is an alternative.
[00:15:04] Clearly, this is problematic. If a young girl only hears about policemen, or firemen, or postmen or businessmen, or even if a young boy hears these terms as standard, it suggests that these are things that can only be done by men.
[00:15:24] Over the past few decades, there has been a move to try to standardise these terms in English, to try to create more inclusive language.
[00:15:34] In some cases, the male variant is chosen as the standard, so there are, for example, no longer actors and actresses, simply “actors”.
[00:15:46] In other cases, a new, non-gendered term is chosen, so there aren’t Policemen and Policewomen, but rather police officers.
[00:15:56] All good so far.
[00:15:58] Perhaps even more strangely, in American English a decision has been taken to change the Spanish language, when used in English, so someone is no longer Latino or Latina, they are Latinx.
[00:16:14] The idea of creating an inclusive term does, it appears, come from a place of good intentions.
[00:16:21] But this particular example of “Latinx” has largely been ridiculed by the Hispanic population. Only 2-3% of Hispanic people reportedly use the term to describe themselves, and it has been criticised as an example of linguistic imperialism, of non-Spanish-speaking Americans changing Spanish to solve a non-existent problem.
[00:16:47] And as to the question of what is the effect of a language having grammatical gender or not, and what is the effect of English having gendered pronouns but not grammatical gender, well this is a tricky one.
[00:17:03] There was a prominent study from 2011 that looked at gender equality in 111 different countries and found that countries where gendered languages were spoken tended to have lower levels of gender equality.
[00:17:18] So, if you live in a country that assigns genders to objects, you are more likely to experience gender inequality.
[00:17:27] You might think, well, if that’s the case, then presumably countries with no gender in their language would be beacons of gender equality, would be great places in terms of equality between men and women.
[00:17:42] Some, Finland, for example, score very highly on this count. Finnish is a language without any genders, neither grammatical nor in personal pronouns, and Finland is a country with high levels of gender equality.
[00:17:59] Others, Cameroon, China and Turkey, for example, do not. These countries don’t use gendered language, but they don’t score very well in terms of gender equality.
[00:18:12] Interestingly, countries where Natural Gender languages like English are spoken, where pronouns have gender but objects do not, score highest overall, they are generally the best places in terms of gender equality.
[00:18:27] Clearly, the language spoken in the country is only one factor here, but it is certainly an interesting piece of research, and shows that even if your language has no inbuilt gender inequality, it certainly doesn’t mean that this will be the case for your society.
[00:18:46] So, what does this all mean for English learners?
[00:18:50] Well, not a lot, really..
[00:18:52] The good news for you is that grammatical gender is one less thing you need to worry about.
[00:18:58] When you talk about a turnip, call it it.
[00:19:02] When you talk about a chair, call it “it” too.
[00:19:06] And when you’re talking about a boat, well the truth is that you can call it “it” as well.
[00:19:14] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on gender in language, and in particular, gender in English.
[00:19:22] I hope it was an interesting one, and that it might have left you thinking a bit about your native language.
[00:19:28] Did you grow up speaking a grammatically gendered language like French or Spanish, a non-gendered language like Turkish or Mandarin, or a naturally gendered language like English, Danish or Swedish?
[00:19:42] How do you think this affected you, and the society you grew up in?
[00:19:47] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:51] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:59] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are discussing genders.
[00:00:25] But not whether a person is a man, a woman, or another gender, or what pronouns one should use.
[00:00:32] But rather, genders in language, and specifically, we will focus on genders in the English language.
[00:00:40] 38% of the world speak a gendered language, meaning they group nouns into categories like masculine, feminine and neuter.
[00:00:50] English is something called a “natural gender language”, meaning that pronouns - he, she, and so on - do have a gender, but objects do not. A chair is a chair, it isn’t masculine, it isn’t feminine, it’s just a chair.
[00:01:05] So why is this?
[00:01:07] Why do most European languages give inanimate objects genders, but English does not?
[00:01:14] Has this always been the case?
[00:01:15] And is it really true that there are no genders in English?
[00:01:21] Let’s get right into it and explore the surprising story behind genders in the English language.
[00:01:29] When speaking about the German language, the American author Mark Twain once said:
[00:01:36] “Every noun has a gender, there is no sense or system in distribution.”
[00:01:42] “In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence, [or great love] that shows for the turnip, and what disrespect for the girl.”
[00:01:57] Here, Twain humorously voices his frustration at trying to understand the German language and its seemingly random categorisation of words.
[00:02:08] As our German listeners will know, the German language has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter, or neutral.
[00:02:17] The word for a ‘girl’ is neuter, while the word for ‘turnip’ is feminine.
[00:02:24] And Twain points out how strange this is, at least for an English-speaker, for a speaker of a language without grammatical genders.
[00:02:34] Why should a turnip have a gender and a girl have none?
[00:02:39] A girl is clearly feminine, and a turnip is, well, it’s a vegetable, it’s neither feminine nor masculine in terms of its gender.
[00:02:49] Twain isn’t alone in being baffled, being confused, by this concept.
[00:02:55] It’s a challenging one for anyone learning a new language, especially if their native language is a grammatically non-gendered one, like English.
[00:03:06] On the flip side, on the other hand, it can make English easier to learn than languages that do have grammatical genders, because you almost never need to worry about remembering what gender an object is in English.
[00:03:21] There are a few exceptions, which we’ll touch on shortly, but as a general rule, you don’t need to worry about whether a turnip is masculine, feminine, or something else. Or a tomato.
[00:03:35] Or a potato.
[00:03:35] Or a TV or a chair or a table. Or any object.
[00:03:40] As you’ll know, non-human objects in English don’t have a gender, which makes life easy.
[00:03:48] So, why is this, why do some languages have grammatical genders, and why is English not one of them?
[00:03:57] Well, we need to start by addressing the first question, of why some languages have genders, before we can get to the specific question of English.
[00:04:09] The first point to underline is that it helps to try to mentally separate the idea of grammatical gender from physical gender, and instead, to think of grammatical gender more like a category, or a way of putting different types of words in different types of boxes, a way of organising language.
[00:04:32] Linguists believe that many gendered languages stem from Proto-Indo-European, a language which existed around 6000 years ago.
[00:04:43] This was the ancestor of European languages and Western and Southern Asian languages such as Hindi, Bengali or Kurdish.
[00:04:52] And Proto-Indo-European categorised nouns into two groups: a group for animate or living things and a group for inanimate things, or objects.
[00:05:07] But over thousands of years many new languages evolved and the categories for words changed, becoming far more varied.
[00:05:18] Words that had been classed merely as inanimate in Proto-Indo-European eventually became either masculine,
[00:05:26] feminine or
[00:05:27] neuter.
[00:05:28] Why?
[00:05:30] Well, linguists believe that the reason for these changes in language can be attributed to the various belief systems of countries affecting how they thought about objects.
[00:05:42] For instance, in the Siberian language Ket, masculine words are often items actually related to the culture’s male-dominated activities like hunting and building.
[00:05:55] For instance, their words for fish and wood are both masculine.
[00:06:02] Meanwhile, words for more domestic things such as illnesses, body parts and plants are often feminine, reflecting women’s position that particular society.
[00:06:15] So, while these inanimate objects don’t, of course, have a gender, in their language their gender corresponds to the real-life people most associated with them.
[00:06:27] And the influence of real-life gender is also present in the Alamblak language of Papua New Guinea.
[00:06:34] In Alamblak, many masculine nouns include the words for snakes, arrows, and trees, long straight shapes.
[00:06:44] I’ll leave you guess why that one might be.
[00:06:48] These examples show how cultural beliefs can affect language and the ways we think and interact with words.
[00:06:56] And linguists believe that this sort of thing happening over many thousands of years slowly led to the evolution of European languages and their gender categories.
[00:07:08] But as any speaker of Spanish, German, French, Italian, or any other European gendered language will know, these cultural influences are often long gone.
[00:07:21] To go back to our example from Mark Twain, a turnip is feminine in German. It’s also feminine in Italian, “la rapa”. But it’s masculine in French [“le navet”] and in Spanish [“el nabo”].
[00:07:38] If there’s a cultural reason why a turnip should be feminine in German and Italian but masuline in French and Spanish, well, I have yet to find it.
[00:07:49] Instead, words tend to be categorised phonetically, words which sound the same can be distinguished by their different genders.
[00:07:59] If we use the example of French or Italian, similar-sounding words often have the same gender.
[00:08:07] In French, for example, words ending in things like "ant" tend to be masculine, whereas words ending in -asse, -ace, or -esse tend to be feminine.
[00:08:20] And in Italian, words ending in an “o” tend to be masculine and words ending in an “ a” tend to be feminine.
[00:08:29] But these are guidelines more than surefire certain rules, as any frustrated French or Italian learner will know all too well.
[00:08:40] Interestingly enough, some studies suggest that grammatical genders do actually make it quicker and easier for people to understand information.
[00:08:49] In other words, gender in language can give clues to your brain that help it retrieve information faster.
[00:08:58] For example, I’m sure you’ve had that annoying, niggling, feeling when you can’t quite remember the correct word to describe what you mean.
[00:09:07] Well, linguists propose that grammatical gender can actually help to eliminate this, with the grammatical gender providing clues to your brain to help you retrieve a word.
[00:09:19] This is, of course, only one theory, and there’s an equally valid argument to be made that genders in language make it more complicated to learn a language.
[00:09:30] After all, the most successful artificial language in history, Esperanto, completely avoided gendered language altogether, with its creator believing that any benefits that gender might have once you had learned the language were outweighed by the additional mental energy required to learn these genders in the first place.
[00:09:51] So, this brings us to English, a non-gendered language.
[00:09:57] Why doesn’t it have grammatical genders, especially considering that there is so much European influence in the language?
[00:10:05] Well, it hasn’t always been this way.
[00:10:08] It might surprise you to find out that up until the 11th century or so, English did have grammatical genders.
[00:10:18] Old English, or Anglo Saxon, had genders, every object was either masculine, feminine or neutral.
[00:10:26] This language had been brought to the British Isles by the Saxons, who came from Northern Europe in the fourth century AD.
[00:10:35] After they settled in the South of England, Anglo Saxon quickly became the dominant language spoken in the British Isles, so most people in Britain were speaking using grammatical gender.
[00:10:48] But just as one group of Northern European invaders brought genders with them, another group of Northern Europeans appeared several centuries later, and unintentionally wiped out the existence of genders in English.
[00:11:04] These were the Vikings.
[00:11:07] Now, you probably know the Vikings as fearsome warriors, bringing with them a reign of terror.
[00:11:14] But they also brought with them their language, Old Norse, when they started to settle in Britain in the late ninth century.
[00:11:23] Old Norse, like Anglo Saxon, did have genders.
[00:11:27] It had masculine, feminine and neuter.
[00:11:30] The problem was that the genders given to objects weren’t always the same in the two languages.
[00:11:36] A turnip might have been feminine in Old English but masculine or neuter in Old Norse.
[00:11:44] Clearly, this made life confusing.
[00:11:47] So, over time, people in Northern England, where the Vikings first landed, started to leave out the gendered parts of their language.
[00:11:57] And this trend slowly travelled down to the Anglo-Saxon south of England, and by the 11th century grammatical genders in English had, by and large, disappeared.
[00:12:09] A turnip became just a turnip.
[00:12:13] But there are some exceptions, some objects still do have genders in English, or at least, semi-genders.
[00:12:22] Now, this is not something you would learn in an English class, but it’s interesting.
[00:12:27] And this is the concept of metaphorical gender.
[00:12:32] For example, boats are often referred to as “she”, they are feminine.
[00:12:39] If you were talking about the Titanic, let’s say, you could say “she set sail to America”. You could also say “it set sail for America”, which wouldn’t be completely wrong, but it would sound very strange to say “he set sail for America”.
[00:12:55] So, a boat is either "it" or it's "she", it's never “he”.
[00:13:00] Interestingly enough, one theory about why this is, at least in the case of boats, is that it comes from the Latin word for boat, navis, which is feminine.
[00:13:12] Another is that there is this idea of a boat having a protective, maternal role for its crew, or rather, her crew, and that’s why boats are often given a gender.
[00:13:25] By the way, it’s not wrong at all to call a boat simply “it”, and indeed the Lloyds Register of Shipping, which knows a thing or two about boats, calls a ship “it”.
[00:13:37] And it’s not just ships that get given genders in English.
[00:13:41] Cars and machines are often feminine in English, but typically only when the person talking about them has some kind of close relationship with them.
[00:13:52] All that being said, this is a pretty niche, unusual, way of speaking, so for all intents and purposes, it is safe to assume that there are no genders used to describe objects in English.
[00:14:07] There are, of course, still gendered terms used to describe people.
[00:14:12] Now, this is perhaps controversial territory we’re getting into here, but the English language historically has male and female pronouns that are used to describe people - he/him, and she/her, with the third person plural, they, being used when the gender of a person is unspecified or unknown.
[00:14:36] And in English, nouns describing the job someone does have historically been slightly different depending on that person's gender.
[00:14:46] Headmaster or Headmistress.
[00:14:48] Policeman or Policewoman.
[00:14:51] Actor or Actress.
[00:14:53] Waiter or Waitress.
[00:14:55] In most cases, the male variant is the dominant one, and the female version is an alternative.
[00:15:04] Clearly, this is problematic. If a young girl only hears about policemen, or firemen, or postmen or businessmen, or even if a young boy hears these terms as standard, it suggests that these are things that can only be done by men.
[00:15:24] Over the past few decades, there has been a move to try to standardise these terms in English, to try to create more inclusive language.
[00:15:34] In some cases, the male variant is chosen as the standard, so there are, for example, no longer actors and actresses, simply “actors”.
[00:15:46] In other cases, a new, non-gendered term is chosen, so there aren’t Policemen and Policewomen, but rather police officers.
[00:15:56] All good so far.
[00:15:58] Perhaps even more strangely, in American English a decision has been taken to change the Spanish language, when used in English, so someone is no longer Latino or Latina, they are Latinx.
[00:16:14] The idea of creating an inclusive term does, it appears, come from a place of good intentions.
[00:16:21] But this particular example of “Latinx” has largely been ridiculed by the Hispanic population. Only 2-3% of Hispanic people reportedly use the term to describe themselves, and it has been criticised as an example of linguistic imperialism, of non-Spanish-speaking Americans changing Spanish to solve a non-existent problem.
[00:16:47] And as to the question of what is the effect of a language having grammatical gender or not, and what is the effect of English having gendered pronouns but not grammatical gender, well this is a tricky one.
[00:17:03] There was a prominent study from 2011 that looked at gender equality in 111 different countries and found that countries where gendered languages were spoken tended to have lower levels of gender equality.
[00:17:18] So, if you live in a country that assigns genders to objects, you are more likely to experience gender inequality.
[00:17:27] You might think, well, if that’s the case, then presumably countries with no gender in their language would be beacons of gender equality, would be great places in terms of equality between men and women.
[00:17:42] Some, Finland, for example, score very highly on this count. Finnish is a language without any genders, neither grammatical nor in personal pronouns, and Finland is a country with high levels of gender equality.
[00:17:59] Others, Cameroon, China and Turkey, for example, do not. These countries don’t use gendered language, but they don’t score very well in terms of gender equality.
[00:18:12] Interestingly, countries where Natural Gender languages like English are spoken, where pronouns have gender but objects do not, score highest overall, they are generally the best places in terms of gender equality.
[00:18:27] Clearly, the language spoken in the country is only one factor here, but it is certainly an interesting piece of research, and shows that even if your language has no inbuilt gender inequality, it certainly doesn’t mean that this will be the case for your society.
[00:18:46] So, what does this all mean for English learners?
[00:18:50] Well, not a lot, really..
[00:18:52] The good news for you is that grammatical gender is one less thing you need to worry about.
[00:18:58] When you talk about a turnip, call it it.
[00:19:02] When you talk about a chair, call it “it” too.
[00:19:06] And when you’re talking about a boat, well the truth is that you can call it “it” as well.
[00:19:14] Ok then, that is it for today’s episode on gender in language, and in particular, gender in English.
[00:19:22] I hope it was an interesting one, and that it might have left you thinking a bit about your native language.
[00:19:28] Did you grow up speaking a grammatically gendered language like French or Spanish, a non-gendered language like Turkish or Mandarin, or a naturally gendered language like English, Danish or Swedish?
[00:19:42] How do you think this affected you, and the society you grew up in?
[00:19:47] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:19:51] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:19:59] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
