Does language affect the way you think of gender?

[darkblade]

I don't know how many people on here aren't native English speakers, but I've been thinking and I wonder what people think of this hypothesis.

So in English, pronouns are easy enough to avoid using (using the person's name instead of saying he/she, for example), and the plural form is gender neutral. But this isn't true for all languages of course. I wonder whether, for example the fact that in my language (as well as others) everything is conjugated based on the person's gender, even objects are gendered, and that a gender neutral term doesn't even exist, is probably hindering my gender questioning process.

The short answer is probably yes, since the concept of gender is probably far more ingrained into my mind than a person that only grew up speaking a language like English (I grew up speaking both English and Arabic). Just curious to see what others might think of this observation, whether you guys agree or disagree, thoughts in general.

[BlaineGame]

Hmmm...I took Latin in high school and since it's a dead language there aren't any terms I know of that are unisex besides using "they" or "it" like objects but I kind of find that demeaning...I do see what you're saying though...I've noticed that too, even though I'm not very fluent with Latin and Spanish

[Sosophia]

In mine language there are words that end fifferently when you speak or yourself depending of the gender , and i didnt learn it for the right one back in school , so its a bit awkward at times since i m not sure how to do

[Marcellow]

Spanish. It really has only two forms: masculine and feminine. I've never heard of a gender neutral pronoun used ever so I'm having a tough time wrapping my mind around non-binary.

[Asche]

I don't know how many people on here aren't native English speakers, but I've been thinking and I wonder what people think of this hypothesis.

... I wonder whether, for example the fact that in my language (as well as others) everything is conjugated based on the person's gender, even objects are gendered, and that a gender neutral term doesn't even exist, is probably hindering my gender questioning process.

I can't speak for  you, but in general, this is a case of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis -- that language affects how we think.

It's one of those ideas that sound so right they must be true, but people who have looked into it (mainly linguists) have concluded that it's not true.  It's more that language is a reflection of people's thinking, which is to say their culture.

FWIW, my native language is English, but I'm fluent in German to the point that I think in it if need to speak or understand it.  German has grammatical gender, like Spanish and Arabic (read Mark Twain's "That Awful German Language" for a humorous take on it), but to the extent that people gender objects, it isn't related to the noun's gender.  Especially since you can have different nouns with different genders for the same object.

I'd say I've had a lot of trouble with dealing with gender, but it's probably more from growing up in a place and time where unmanliness in men and unwomanliness in women were even more taboo than they are now.

But I'm not a very language-oriented person.  I tend to think non-verbally, which I mainly notice when I try to put my thoughts into words.  It's not a lot easier for me to turn them into English than into German, despite not having been in a German-speaking environment for decades.

[Taka]

it's a little weird to see latin being spoken of as "dead" when it really just transitioned and changed names to italian, french, etc...

i speak a language that has no grammatical gender at all.
gender has a ridiculous lot of importance in the local community.
does language affect how we think...?
no, it only affects how we choose to describe the world.
learning a new language means getting new words to describe the spectacular colors around,
but stones still won't learn to fly even if you use a different word for flying,
and people's perception of gender will be what importance a society imposes on it.

[Taka]

Do you speak Japanese, 髙 ?

話せます。ですが、僕は高じゃなくて鷹なんです。
but the language i was talking about isn't even japanese...

[PucksWaywardSon]

It's an interesting question. I know that people can percieve colours differently when their language groups them significantly differently (I've seen several videos on the subject, a quick youtube search should bring it up if you're interested) - I'd actually be interested to see if languages that tend to differentiate people by age/status rather than gender for social interaction might correlate to a community that is more genderblind. I spent a month in Tanzania as a kid and from what little I remember of Swahili there are loads of ways to say hello but the all stem from who the person you are talking to is *in relation to you* - older, more experienced, more important etc.

[darkblade]

The Whorf hypothesis certainly has something to do with this, but hmm I wasn't aware that people have shown it to be untrue. My psychology is a bit rusty..
Anyhow, I was thinking more in terms of neurological hardwiring of the brain based on the language one speaks as a child.

I know that people can perceive colours differently when their language groups them significantly differently.

Things like this make me believe there's more to the way culture can mould the brain than simply putting things in terms of the Whorf hypothesis. Since we know that any language learned before the age of 6 gets "wired" into a child's brain in a way that languages learned afterwards never can be, I'm assuming that perhaps the neurological connections that get made that relate to gender and sex also form in accordance with the language the kid speaks. So if your language has gender neutral pronouns, then your brain knows that some things are gender irrelevant. If your language genders everything, then your brain wires itself early on to only acknowledge the binary forms of gender (hence it would be harder to wrap your head around a gender spectrum later on?).

Maybe I should go talk to the neuroscientists at school...

[Taka]

linguistically, gender can have absolutely no importance for most things.
but gender always has relevance in practical situations. maybe it could work if you called a peraon a person, but as soon as we feel a need to identify people, we start talking about that guy or that woman. i don't know of any language that doesn't have different words for man and woman.

my own language that lacks grammatical gender, makes up for it with very extensive vocabulary for relatives. there are four different types of aunts, depending on the relation. i know south korean does the same kind of thing. and they don't even call people by their name if they have children, but instead they use to address parents (even one they're married to) as the mother or father of the oldest son (using the son's name). that's of course also a language without grammatical gender.
japanese takes things quite far, or has in modern times. despite there being no grammatical gender, women and men speak very differently, both status and gender have become deeply coded in the language, just in other ways than grammar. it's more about a choice of words.

[Michaela Whimsy]

I was somewhat trying to wrap my head around this topic earlier today.  For me barely notice pronouns and with that improperly gendered pronouns do not seem to bother me ( unless they are used in malice).  My native language is American English, and very western US in diction.  I did grow up around a lot of slang and curse words, a lot of which strongly refer to one gender or the other and often used on the opposite gender in a demeaning sense.  Some of these curse words are used in place of nouns, pronouns and adjectives.

In my adult life and especially with the military it is common to use other than common pronouns for things.  So I guess I am just not used to pronouns.  It is hard for me to completely understand the improper pronoun use.  I was wondering if it was connected.

[Taka]

people who grew up with only languages where grammatical gender or gender specific pronouns don't exist, often have problems with learning the right pronouns in languages where it matters.
my daughter, even though she spoke norwegian and english outside home, didn't learn the difference between he/she and him/her until she was around 7 i think. before that she used only he and her. fantastic combination. the most likely reason is that i only speak saami to her, and thus she's never been corrected by me on pronouns. we don't care about gender in the way we refer to people. it always matters in any other contexts though. male chauvinism is strong in the saami community here.

[Leila]

I speak two dialects of Chinese and there are limited pronouns used in Chinese, none of them are gendered. Chinese dialects have different grammatical rules between them, but all of them are typically non-gendered unless there is a requirement for clarity to the reader or listener. An exception to this though is when using honorific titles. Honorific titles can get very specific for family relations.

If you talk about someone in the third person, you don't necessarily have to point out their gender unless you want or have to.

Eg "Where's Andy/Andi gone"? "They've gone out". So was Andy/Andi a girl or a boy?
"Have you seen what they are doing over there"? "You mean that man"?

Chinese names (from my limited understanding of them) verbally can be misconstrued as non-gender, so referring to someone else in conversation may lead to ambiguity to the listener.

[LilDevilOfPrada]

I speak two languages and in the one we don't have specific pronouns for he/she we say u-word the u means you/he/she in a way but I don't believe language has effected my beliefs on gender.