Historical culturomics of pronoun frequencies

[Felix]

Language Log
Mark Liberman
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4126

discussion of Male and Female Pronoun Use in U.S. Books Reflects Women's Status, 1900–2008 at http://www.springerlink.com/content/l323p74567638354/

As I observed in an earlier post, apparent historical trends of this kind in word frequencies or in ratios of word frequencies can have several qualitatively different sorts of explanations:

The mix of kinds of books published changes over time (e.g. more romance novels, fewer collections of sermons); different kinds of books use words differently; therefore the relative frequency of words changes.
The mix of kinds of books selected for the Google Books ngram collections changes over time; so the relative frequency of words changes, for similar reasons as in (1).
The distribution of concepts or conceptual frames changes over time, even in the same sorts of books.
The choice of words to express a given concept (in published books) changes over time, even in the same sorts of books.
David Brown ("Gender Pronouns in the News", Grammar Lab 8/12/2012) tries to address part of this uncertainty by calculating a similar ratio (of gendered pronouns) using data from an independent source, namely the Corpus of Historical American English.  David looked only at he and she, rather than the full set of masculine and feminine third-person singular pronouns, but this turns out not to make much difference.

[Felix]

I know this is a little jargony, but it's fun once you wade into it.

[Padma]

Thanks for this. I've been noticing this in writings a lot more since I began transitioning - both the undeniable exclusivity of it, and also my denial of it back when it didn't exclude me. I'm ashamed of that.

[MadelineB]

Thanks for this. I've been noticing this in writings a lot more since I began transitioning - both the undeniable exclusivity of it, and also my denial of it back when it didn't exclude me. I'm ashamed of that.

Interesting article. I remember as a (closeted) queer teenager being frustrated with the inequity of pronouns, and teaching myself some esperanto because it had a much richer neutral pronoun set (I thought). Too bad I only knew two people who spoke it, and one of them died.
Later I just got used to dealing with the English biases, using 'they' and 'their' if I wasn't being graded by a strict grammarian, or alternating between he and she if I was. Spanish was even more gendered than English, but Korean and Chinese were nice because you can make complete, proper, colloquial sense going gender neutral all the way through. I don't know what it is about Western cultures that includes a need to assign a (binary) gender to everyone and everything in the world, including the world itself.

[Padma]

People claim that it doesn't matter - but I have a book (blast, can't find it, can't remember the title or anything) which details a study in which it was proved that in languages where objects are gendered, people have different relationships with the concepts, which are reflected in their own gender biases. One strong example was the difference in attitude towards bridges (solid/dependable vs. shaky/rickety), depending on whether the participant's language maled or femaled bridges.

I've always gone with they/their in preference to he/she or whatever (although I quite like (s)he as well, since it's compact) - outside of very, very formal writing, this is now completely acceptable English, I have it on good authority .

[MadelineB]

I've always gone with they/their in preference to he/she or whatever (although I quite like (s)he as well, since it's compact) - outside of very, very formal writing, this is now completely acceptable English, I have it on good authority .

Oh good, I use (s)he a lot in my poetry, so I'm glad I'm not just making it up.

[Felix]

People claim that it doesn't matter - but I have a book (blast, can't find it, can't remember the title or anything) which details a study in which it was proved that in languages where objects are gendered, people have different relationships with the concepts, which are reflected in their own gender biases. One strong example was the difference in attitude towards bridges (solid/dependable vs. shaky/rickety), depending on whether the participant's language maled or femaled bridges.

I've always gone with they/their in preference to he/she or whatever (although I quite like (s)he as well, since it's compact) - outside of very, very formal writing, this is now completely acceptable English, I have it on good authority .

Yeah there's pretty lively discussion in linguistics regarding how (and how much) our words affect the way we think and behave. And gendered pronouns in English make statements even when we try to be neutral. It's a weird situation to try to work with, considering the layers that we have in our internal biases and stuff and then on top of that having to use words to discuss words and thoughts to discuss thoughts.

[justmeinoz]

Sounds like someone is working on their Thesis! 
Interesting topic like a lot of obscure things, once you get into them.

[Padma]

Oh good, I use (s)he a lot in my poetry, so I'm glad I'm not just making it up.

Sorry, my ambiguous self-copy-editing: I meant that they/their are correct English singular pronouns - but I like (s)he too .