A bridge by any other name

Let’s get one thing straight: grammatical gender and human gender are not the same. Grammatical gender refers to the ways that some languages divide nouns into classes. For this reason, linguists often call grammatical genders noun classes instead.

Some languages, like Swahili, have so many noun classes that each is labelled with a number. Other languages, like French or German, have fewer. Often, when a language has fewer noun classes, each class has a name based on distinctive words that belong to that class. Commonly, the name ‘masculine’ is given to the class that contains words like ‘man’ and ‘father’ and takes the same forms of agreement as individual men like Martijn. Similarly, the name ‘feminine’ is given to the class that contains words like ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ and takes the same forms of agreement as individual women like Sanne. 

Even though the names given to these classes are arbitrary, some work has shown that the distinctive members of a noun class can affect how speakers think about words in that class. In other words, cultural norms of masculinity and femininity can shape how speakers think about words with masculine and feminine grammatical gender.

In a classic study, Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips (2003) asked Spanish and German speakers to describe various objects that belong to different noun classes in their respective languages. The word for bridge belongs to the feminine noun class in German (die Brücke) and the masculine noun class in Spanish (el puente). German speakers were more likely to describe bridges as elegant or slender (adjectives usually associated with femininity) while Spanish speakers called them strong or sturdy. Speakers associated the same object with different mental images based on its noun class.

This shows both how powerful cultural norms of masculinity and femininity are, and how easily they can be applied to something as small and arbitrary as whether a bridge belongs to one noun class or another. Think of it like wearing tinted glasses. You still see what is there, but the colors are shifted, even down to the smallest details.

Can a language be sexist?

A common misconception is that noun classes themselves are sexist. For instance, in French, the default plural is masculine. If even one man is present in a group, many French speakers will refer to the group using grammatical forms for the masculine noun class. A group of nine women and one man? Many speakers will use the masculine form of ‘they’ (ils) and not the feminine (elles). This linguistic convention reinforces a social hierarchy where men are seen as more worthy of mention than women.

But is the language itself at fault for this? Ultimately, speakers are in charge of how they use a language, and many French speakers do choose to speak in inclusive ways, perhaps referring to mixed gender groups as ces personnes (using ‘people’, a feminine word) in order to use feminine forms. Moreover, much public discourse in France concerns enforcing bon usage, or ‘good use’, of the language, highlighting how what is considered ‘good French’ is something that must be actively and continuously negotiated (Fleischmann 1997). In other words, French itself is not sexist, but sometimes what is considered ‘good French’ might be.

The tension between how language both reflects and shapes how we see the world can be seen clearly in how children learn languages with masculine and feminine noun classes. Children pick up quickly on the association between noun classes and cultural norms about gender, but it does seem to require some schooling. Sera et al. (1994) asked Spanish-speaking children whether inanimate objects in a cartoon should be given a boy’s voice or a girl’s voice. They found that seven-year-olds, but not five-year-olds, were more likely to assign a voice that was consistent with the classification of the object in Spanish. In other words, associations between grammar and gender are learned as much as they are taught.

Thinking in categories

In psycholinguistics, a long line of work has been especially interested in how grammatical gender interacts with cognition. For example, how quickly can speakers retrieve a noun from the masculine noun class versus feminine noun class? Are intrinsically gendered words like ‘actress’ stored differently in the brain from words without intrinsic gender, like ‘firefighter’ or ‘desk’? Studies using reaction times and eye-tracking suggest that grammatical gender cues influence how words are processed and accessed. When a language requires you to mark gender, your brain gets used to treating that information as relevant, even if you don’t consciously notice it.

Even so, speakers of languages without grammatical gender, like English or Mandarin speakers, also show gender biases—just in different ways. English speakers, for instance, still associate certain roles or professions with men or women, and those associations can affect how quickly they process related words or images. So gender in language is about more than just grammar: it is about culture, history, and how language and thought feed into each other.

References

• Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L. A., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, syntax, and semantics. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition (pp. 61–79). MIT Press.
• Fleischman, S. (1997). The battle of feminism and bon usage: instituting nonsexist usage in French. French Review, 834-844.
• Sera, M. D., Berge, C. A. H., & del Castillo Pintado, J. (1994). Grammatical and conceptual forces on the categorization of objects by sex. Child Development, 65(3), 934–950.

Credits

• Writer: Morgane Peirolo

• Editor: Anna Mai

• Dutch translation: Lieke Herraets

• German translation: Jule Hafermann