Genderless language

A genderless language is a natural or constructed language that has no distinctions of grammatical gender—that is, no categories requiring morphological agreement between nouns and associated pronouns, adjectives, articles, or verbs.^[1]

The notion of "genderless language" must not be confused with that of gender-neutral language. Also, a discourse in a genderless language is not necessarily gender-neutral,^[1] although genderless languages exclude many possibilities for reinforcement of gender-related stereotypes, such as using masculine pronouns when referring to persons by their occupations (although some languages that may be identified as genderless, including English, do have distinct male and female pronouns). A lack of gendered pronouns is also distinct from a lack of gender in the grammatical sense.

Genderless languages do have various means to recognize gender, such as gender-specific words (mother, son, etc., and distinct pronouns such as he and she in some cases), as well as gender-specific context, both biological and cultural.^[1]

Find who you are

United human gender equality sign

Genderless languages are listed at List of languages by type of grammatical genders. Genderless languages include the Indo-European languages Bengali and Persian, all the Uralic languages (such as Hungarian and Finnish), all the modern Turkic languages (such as Turkish), Chinese, Japanese, Korean, all the Austronesian languages (such as the Polynesian languages), and Vietnamese.

Language contact

Morphological view

From the morphological point of view, grammatical gender may arise because of language contact. For example, the Greek language has lost its three genders due to the impact of the genderless Turkish language. In the same way, the Persian grammatical gender was influenced by the Turkish language. These were called "universal simplifications" in the reduction of sex system.^[2] Surveys about gender systems around the world from 256 languages show that 112 (44%) are grammatical gender and 144 languages (56%) are genderless languages.^[3] Since these two types of languages in many cases are geographically close to each other, there is a significant chance that one influences the other. For example, the Basque language is considered genderless language, but it has been influenced by the Spanish feminine-masculine gender binary system.

Loaned from other languages

Gender has been associated with words but not with ideas. Scholars are trying to study the development of gender in nouns that have been borrowed from other languages. One example of this innovation is the gender assignment from the Italian American to the genderless English names. The phonological form of the loaned word sometimes determines its sex. For example, Italians who immigrated to America do not identify the word freezer, but instead heard "freezə." This sound is similar to schwa /a/, so the word becomes "frisa." Consequently, the new word ends in /a/ which is feminine. The same happens with the words water (la vuora), the sweater (la suera), and the quarter (la quora). This process happens also in American-German and American-French. In English words ending in -ing, it sounds like French -ine and in German -ung which are feminine suffixes. In this case, the genderless nouns do not generate one gender or another. In the American-Italian language, masculine gender is the default gender. This default automatically happens in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Norwegian, and Old English.^[4]

Gender Inequality

Firefighter occupation

The way societies use sex or gender in their languages differ based on their culture. Genderless languages which are absent of feminine and masculine nouns and pronouns most of the time use a specific pronoun to represent both. Masculine generics are utilized to describe people and objects of unknown sex. The use of masculine generics could be negative for women because eventually, this internalizes in society as a norm. For example, using fireman, businessman, or referring to all professors as he may generate cognitive bias. Genderless languages may contribute to making women invisible in their societies and prevent them from succeeding in male dominated occupations.^[5] Gender inequality persists in many places, and gender stereotypes are commonly based on biological characteristics.^[6] In our society, use of feminine or masculine terminology impacts people's perception and influences our cultural biases.^[7]

See also

• Gender neutrality in genderless languages
• Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender
• Grammatical gender
• Gender-neutral pronoun
• Gender inequality
• Feminist language reform
• Lavender linguistics

References