The Influence of Grammatical Gender on the Perception of Gender

Abstract

A grammatical gender language is one that assigns a gender category, mainly in the forms of feminine or masculine, to a word. These can appear as suffixes (the masculine heureux versus the feminine heureuse) or definite articles (le or la). This paper explains linguistic relativity and how the theory builds ground for evidence that grammatical gender actively influences perception of gender, introduces multilingualism as a factor in play in discussions of the impact of grammatical gender on cognition, discusses the real-world applications of grammatical gender, and incorporates the recent findings on Artificial Intelligence and algorithmic gender bias due to language-learning intelligence systems imitating human use of language, examining and cross-referencing a multitude of studies conducted over the years to offer a fully rounded review and analysis of the literature.