Linguistic Gender Research Articles

Resisting linguistic marginalization in professional spaces: Constructing multi-layered oppositional stances

AbstractThis paper analyzes the resistant stances enacted by six recently-graduated, Hindi medium educated (HME) Indian women against the primacy accorded to English medium educated (EME) individuals in urban professional hiring practices. The data were collected in face-to-face, audio-recorded interviews by the researcher in the summer of 2013 from New Delhi. Aligning with Jaffe’s (2009) argument that a salient role of stance-based research is to theorize the relationship between stancetaking and sociocultural conditions and adopting a critical constructivist perspective (while withholding claims about participants’ inner psychological states), this paper shows that within the postcolonial context of urban India, the liminal, hybrid, third spaces of participants’ locations are discursively connected to the exigencies and inequalities characteristic of their local social structures. Analysis of participants’ resistant stances demonstrates their complex, multi-layered, and context-specific characteristics elucidating the ways in which these stance performances are achieved by variously intertwining discourses about linguistic prejudices, nationalism, colonialism, gender and socioeconomic conditions. Specifically, these sociopolitical issues are related to (i) gender-based personal safety anxieties, (ii) neoliberal discourses about India’s demographic dividend (i.e. the public celebration of the increase in the country’s ‘young’ population), (iii) arguments about justice, citizenship and national language, (iv) discourses of colonialism and government apathy, (v) group rights, ethics and responsibilities, and (vi) an unvarnished shaming of the ubiquity of EME preference in local hiring practices. The paper argues that HME-associated linguistic exclusionary practices, whether driven by economic necessities or by biased linguistic ideologies, perpetuate and deepen existing class-based divides, fail the aspirational needs of a growing urban, youthful, and vernacular medium educated population while further complicating the challenges faced by women in a historically patriarchal society.

Trans* Disruptions

Abstract There are an increasing number of university students who express a fluid gender embodiment and identity, resisting binary gender categories as well as binary transgender categories. The use of gender-neutral, as well as third-person plural pronouns, disrupts linguistic gender hegemony and creates particular gendered meanings. With the increasing number of trans* people who queer the gender binary, how does language affirm or deny their personhood? This research note uses data from an online survey (N = 557) to examine teachers' recognition of trans* individuals' pronouns. Results demonstrate that trans* students who identify as genderqueer tend to use gender-neutral and third-person pronouns. However, educators are less affirming when it comes to gender-neutral pronoun recognition. Educators must resist taken-for-granted gender attribution processes and explicitly ask all students to state their pronouns. Accurate pronoun recognition supports trans* students' identity development and honors their personhood.

Construction of Gender Identity in Political Discourse

The article regards the phenomenon of political communication from the perspective of the particularities of constructing gender identity by politicians. As far as the influence of the gender factor on politicians' speech is concerned, the most relevant approach among many others is the discourse approach formed within the paradigm of cognitive linguistics, which considers political discourse as the object of study. The paper deals with the notion of political discourse and examines a hypothesis that gender factor might have a number of manifestations in political communication. It is noted that studying the specificity of constructing gender identity by politicians in discursive practices is becoming a highly topical issue as the importance of female participation in public and political life is growing. Political decision-making has long been considered the prerogativeofmen, but now the necessity of studying the female factor in this sphere is obvious. The author dwells upon the historical background of linguistic gender studies and summarizes the main stages of their development focusing mainly on the theory of the social construction of gender. The founders of this theory advance the thesis that an individual's gender identity is shaped in the process of constructing gender relations in communicative interaction. Further in the article we analyse a few devices of creating the images of masculinity and femininity by famous English and American politicians. As structural components of gender identity, masculinity and femininity turn out to be modifiable parameters depending on the pragmatic attitudes of communicators. Traditional androcentrism of political discourse may account for modifying the female speech style towards masculinity to achieve certain communicative aims.

How Persistent are Grammatical Gender Effects? The Case of German and Tamil.

Does the language we speak shape the way we think? The present research concentrated on the impact of grammatical gender on cognition and examined the persistence of the grammatical gender effect by (a) concentrating on German, a three-gendered language, for which previous results have been inconsistent, (b) statistically controlling for common alternative explanations, (c) employing three tasks that differed in how closely they are associated with grammatical gender, and (d) using Tamil, a nongendered language, as a baseline for comparison. We found a substantial grammatical gender effect for two commonly used tasks, even when alternative explanations were statistically controlled for. However, there was basically no effect for a task that was only very loosely connected to grammatical gender (similarity rating of word pairs). In contrast to previous studies that found effects of the German and Spanish grammatical gender in English (a nongendered language), our study did not produce such effects for Tamil, again after controlling for alternative explanations, which can be taken as additional evidence for the existence of a purely linguistic grammatical gender effect. These results indicate that general grammatical gender effects exist but that the size of these effects may be limited and their range restricted.

Names of Toys in the Early Vocabulary of Mongolian Children and their Relation to Gender

This article is devoted to a very up-to-date area of linguistic research–linguistic gender. More specifically, it pays special attention to how gender linked language effects are revealed in the names of toys in the overall production of Mongolian child language by distinguishing the main stages of children’s linguistic development as well as gender acquisition. In a broader sense, this aspect of child development is supposed to bring us one step closer to better understand the interaction between biology and environment.

Nothing to do with me! Teachers’ perceptions on cultural diversity in Spanish secondary schools

One of the key effects of globalisation is the extraordinary increase in migratory movements. Spain, a country traditionally accustomed to emigration, has seen a considerable rise in the influx of immigrant population, with notable demographic, social and cultural transformations. Particularly, since the early 90s, schools have been experiencing increasing ethnic diversity in their student enrolments. Especially, over the last 10 years, their presence has multiplied 10-fold, reaching 9.53% of the total student body. Thus, along with linguistic difference, class, gender or ability, the most characteristic feature of Spanish schools in recent years is their multicultural nature. For these reasons, it seems reasonable to focus on how Spanish schools, and particularly teachers, perceive and manage cultural diversity. This article reports on a multiple case design study concerning the teachers’ views on cultural diversity and the impact on daily practice in their classrooms. Participants included 16 teachers, with experience ranging from 2 to 20 years of teaching, from four Spanish secondary schools. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with the teachers from each school were chosen as the research method. Additionally, the principal and four immigrant student families from each school were also interviewed. Further information was obtained through a focus-group interview with the four school counsellors. Over a six-month period, all the interviews and complementary field work were carried out by a researcher in each school. While recognising the efforts to accommodate ethnic groups and immigrant populations, the results indicated that teachers perceive cultural diversity as a particular problem whose management is marginalised and excluded from the set of school activities and teaching practices. Teachers agree that the issue is one of adaptation, a problem to be solved by the students themselves with the support of school counsellors and other educational specialists. This way, neither school policies nor teaching practices assume the commitments arising from cultural diversity, so we cannot say that teachers incorporate it in their work, putting culturally relevant teaching into practice in their classrooms. While one of the benchmarks achieved in recent years is the presence of educational specialists in schools to address cultural diversity, the next step is to create the conditions to articulate a joint and collaborative effort between the teaching body and these professionals, bringing cultural diversity management closer to the classroom. Another pending challenge would be determining how we can best prepare teachers for organising and managing their culturally diverse classrooms. Teachers in these schools are doing their job without a professional knowledge base concerning multicultural education. Therefore, pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes should consider questions related to multicultural education and classroom management, which are absent or rarely taken into account in teacher training to date.

A Preliminary Investigation into Effects of Linguistic Abstraction on the Perception of Gender in Spoken Language.

We investigated the role that linguistic abstraction may play in people’s perceptions of gender in spoken language. In the first experiment, participants told stories about their best friend and romantic partner. Variations in linguistic abstraction and gender-linked adjectives for describing their close others were examined. Participants used significantly more abstract language to describe men compared to women, possibly reflecting a gender stereotype associated with the dispositionality factor of linguistic abstraction. In a second experiment, a new group of participants judged the gender of the protagonists from the stories generated in Experiment 1, after the explicit linguistic gender cues were removed. Consistent with the dispositionality factor, linguistic abstraction moderated the effects of the gender stereotypicality of the context (masculine, feminine, or neutral) on participants’ gender judgments. Discussion focuses on the implications of the results for the communication of gender stereotypes and the effects of linguistic abstraction in more naturalistic language.

Linguistic gender marking and its international business ramifications

Darwin (1859) considered language a form of memory that stores information in a genome-like mode. Grammar, according to cognitive science research (Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips, 2003), impacts a speakers’ cognitive framework and mental representation of social reality. Gender is among the most stable grammatical features (Wichmann & Holman, 2009), and comparing languages is valuable for understanding their social role (Corbett, 2011). Such research should have significant value for international business (IB), where national variations are of focal interest but where the study of linguistics has mostly been relegated to a subset of culture. Culture-based research currently relies on aggregate values-based measures of culture (e.g., Hofstede, 1980, 1998; Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004), making it susceptible to endogeneity problems, and contemporaneous to gender outcomes. In contrast, a language’s grammatical structure is a stable feature inherited from the distant past, unbiased by present social, political and economic forces.

İspanyolcada dilsel ve toplumsal cinsiyetçilik analizi

This work is based on the problem that Spanish is a sexist language or not. In thisdirection identifying the relationship between language and sex, the biologicallydefined sex and the socially constructed gender will be clarified. Besides, it willattempt to demonstrate the differences between two concepts. The expressions thatcaused the Spanish to be described as sexist will be exemplified and will be determined if the base of sexism is language or society. The trends that create thesexist rhetoric will be mentioned giving place to the importance of context, thespeaker’s and the listener’s perception of sexism. In this article the solution proposals about the linguistic gender inequality in Spanish will be discussed andfinally it will be reviewed how the sexism is perceived during the teaching ofSpanish as foreign language

Lost in (Trans)lation: The Misread Body of Herculine Barbin

After the twentieth-century’s crise de la langue, it might be considered commonplace to hear the phrase, “the meaning was lost in translation.” However, the twenty-first century has inaugurated a new era in which “linguistic gender bending” among transsexuals has witnessed a recrudescence and the desire to translate the meaning of this identity is at the center of the gender movement. Today, numerous trans-autobiographies attract buyers at Fnac or on Amazon.fr: Né homme, comment je suis devenue femme, Alain transsexuelle and Je serai elle just to name a few examples. Besides their discourses that recount a marginalised social identity, all share a common linguistic denominator: a narrative alternation between genders. However, this modern linguistic heterodoxy may owe more to the past than it seems. Discovered in the 1860’s by Auguste Tardieu and first published under the title Question médico-légale de l’identité, the memoirs of Herculine Barbin might represent the genesis of the practice of trans-subjectivisation through the linguistic manipulation of gender. Herculine’s life, told through h/er memoirs, exemplifies a linguistic attempt to expose a trans-identity relegated to the margins of nineteenth-century French life. This essay will explore the hermeneutic function of narrative gender variation in Mes souvenirs (the memoirs of Herculine Barbin). On the one hand, this essay will attempt to show how, in the French version, Herculine’s trans-discourse produces a narrative subversiveness that transcends social margins and expresses what it means to be between genders. On the other hand, I will expose how the English version of Mes souvenirs, translated by Richard McDougall, pigeon-holes her identity into one of two genders and therefore removes from h/er discourse any possible trans-subversiveness.

Round Women and Long Men: Shape, Size, and the Meanings of Gender in New Guinea and Beyond

The concept of gender has three faces. Natural gender (N-gender, or sex), Social gender (S-gender), which reflects the social implications of being a man or a woman (or perhaps something in between), and Linguistic gender (L-gender). L-gender tends to mirror social and cultural stereotypes of S-gender. Recurrent correlations between shape, size, and L-gender choice are a feature of languages of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. After a brief summary of L-gender and the principles of its choice across languages, a detailed analysis is offered of L-gender choice in Manambu, a Ndu language from the Sepik region. It is shown that gender assignment to humans correlates with N-gender and reflects S-gender status. Other nouns have no fixed gender. Their gender depends on the physical properties of the noun’s referent. We then turn to a cross-linguistic survey of other languages, in New Guinea and beyond, where shape and size are deployed as semantic parameters in L-gender choice. Further semantic correlates of gender assignment in the languages of the world include the roles of referents in myths, and salient properties correlating with the position of S-gender (especially relevant for L-gender choice and L-genders switches for humans).

Grammatical Gender Trouble and Hungarian Gender[lessness]. Part I: Comparative Linguistic Gender

The aim of this study is to define linguistic gender[lessness], with particular reference in the latter part of the article to Hungarian, and to show why it is a feminist issue. I will discuss the [socio]linguistics of linguistic gender in three types of languages, those, like German and the Romance languages, among others, which possess grammatical gender, languages such as English, with only pronominal gender (sometimes misnamed ‘natural gender’), and languages such as Hungarian and other Finno-Ugric languages, as well as many other languages in the world, such as Turkish and Chinese, which have no linguistic or pronomial gender, but, like all languages, can make lexical gender distinctions. While in a narrow linguistic sense linguistic gender can be said to be afunctional, this does not take into account the ideological ramifications in gendered languages of the “leakage” between gender and sex[ism], while at the same time so-called genderless languages can express societal sexist assumptions linguistically through, for example, lexical gender, semantic derogation of women, and naming conventions. Thus, both languages with overt grammatical gender and those with gender-related asymmetries of a more covert nature show language to represent traditional cultural expectations, illustrating that linguistic gender is a feminist issue.

Variability in Chinese: The Case of a Morphosyntactic Particle

DE (?) is the most widely used morphosyntactic particle in Chinese and its most salient features are multifunctionality and optionality. Most existing research is prescriptive and very few studies investigate how speakers actually use DE. This study describes Chinese speakers’ DE use and the effects of linguistic functions, gender, and formality. Results show that contrary to prescriptive claims, speakers occasionally omit DE from clause as modifier environments. Multivariate analysis of DE tokens shows both DE functions and gender are significant. Females tend to use DE more than males. Finally, comparison results of DE use in formal vs. informal situations and oral vs. writing indicate that DE tends to be omitted more in informal speech than in formal situations and writings.

Speaking the gendered body: The performative construction of commercial femininities and masculinities via body-part vocabulary

ABSTRACTThis study illustrates how body-part vocabulary can contribute to linguistic gender construction. As a starting point, gendering mechanisms pertinent to body-part terms are delineated. On a theoretical plane, the study is indebted to poststructuralism and the notion of performativity in identity construction. Gender performativity via body-part vocabulary is explored by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing material from a corpus of 2,000 advertisements from the two magazines,CosmopolitanandMen’s Health, yielding evidence on how two specific commercial versions of femininity and masculinity are discursively constructed. The findings are highly stereotypical and therefore bear witness to body-part lexemes as traces of dominant gender discourses whose gender indexicality can be strategically exploited. The concluding discussion advances a theorization of linguistic identity construction in line with performativity, which departs from more traditional variationist approaches that see identity as a pre-discursive fact. (Language and gender, body, advertising discourse, body-part vocabulary, poststructuralism, performativity)

On the culture-specificity of linguistic gender differences: The case of English and Russian apologies

Abstract The present paper analyzes the influence of gender and culture on speech act performance. Although culture as a factor shaping gender roles can be regarded as being implicitly addressed by the growing number of speech act studies analyzing gender differences in various languages, results from such studies are difficult to compare. This study examines responses to offensive situations produced under identical contextual conditions by English and Russian women and men, thus ensuring comparability across groups and allowing for statements on the culture-specificity of linguistic gender differences. The first part of the paper offers a contrastive analysis of English and Russian responses to offensive situations, sketching some culture-specific differences in dealing with them. The second part is devoted to an investigation of gender-based differences in English and Russian, their comparison and interpretation. Apart from apology strategies and intensifying devices, the study also examines the use of downgrading strategies and the effect of strategy combinations on the illocutionary force of the responses.

Linguistic Gender Differences of Undergraduate Students in CMC

Linguistic Gender Differences of Undergraduate Students in CMC

Gender shifts in the history of English (review)

Reviewed by: Gender shifts in the history of English by Anne Curzan Terttu Nevalainen Gender shifts in the history of English. By Anne Curzan. (Studies in English language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 223. ISBN 0521820073. $85 (Hb). Anne Curzan begins her monograph by telling how she was voted the ‘Word of the millennium’ at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in 2000. This piece of recent history is a fitting introduction to her book highlighting the role of anaphoric personal pronouns in the fundamental change that English underwent from grammatical to natural gender in the course of the last millennium. C takes a broad view of gender in chronological and linguistic terms, including the topic of language and gender in public debates in the English-speaking world over the last few decades. This concern for current relevance makes the book informative not only for language professionals but also for the general reader interested in language. Starting from the present, C places issues such as the generic use of the masculine pronoun he in the bigger picture of linguistic gender in the history of English. She does this by approaching the topic from three interrelated angles: (i) the development of personal pronoun reference to animate beings, (ii) the loss of grammatical gender and the concomitant rise of natural gender in personal pronouns referring to inanimate objects, and (iii) the semantic shifts in the lexical fields of words that clearly retain gender in a natural gender system, that is, the words for ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘girl’, and ‘boy’ (6). Ch. 1 introduces the theoretical terms in which the shift from Old English grammatical gender to natural gender in Middle English and its manifestations today can be accounted for. C’s approach crosses disciplinary boundaries by including social and cultural considerations besides linguistic ones. Charles Hockett’s definition (cited in Corbett 1991:1) provides the umbrella term for linguistic gender ‘as a system of noun classification reflected in associated words’. This definition covers both semantic and grammatical gender, based on whether the semantics of a noun defines its gender (semantic or natural gender) or not (grammatical gender). C’s study focuses on the loss of grammatical gender as it is reflected in personal pronoun anaphora, that is, outside the noun phrase rather than inside it, in patterns of agreement between nouns and their determiners and modifiers. This perspective is informed by the agreement hierarchy proposed by Corbett (1991), which provides a principled tool for tracing the erosion of grammatical gender (19). Moving from left to right, the hierarchy marks an increasing likelihood of semantic gender agreement in a language. At all times third-person personal pronouns stand out as the category most likely to show semantic rather than grammatical agreement with their antecedents. (1) attributive < predicate < relative pronoun < personal pronoun The modern natural gender system in English can thus be viewed as the endpoint of a crosslinguistically attested diachronic development, not a historical anomaly. But this scalar framework can entail problems for the traditional view that gender is a fixed property of the word. The issue is connected with the fact that gender is a covert category even in languages with natural gender such as Modern English and that ‘the English people are consistently inconsistent in [End Page 880] their choice of gendered pronouns according to strict natural gender rules’ (20). Inconsistency particularly occurs in gender assignment to inanimate nouns. C therefore advocates a more dynamic view of gender as a cultural construct to account for both synchronic variation and historical changes. Ch. 2 shows that coming to grips with the notion of gender has not always been easy in histories of English. C’s discussion here as elsewhere is balanced and comprehensive, painting a broad picture of the history of the discipline from prescientific accounts to standard reference works and more specific treatments, including the controversy over Middle English being a creole (a view C rejects). Tracing back earlier uses of the term ‘gender shift’, one could add Poussa (1992:408), who launched the term ‘Great gender shift’ in her study of the demonstratives this and that. How can a historical linguist then document this shift from grammatical to...

Can the term "genderlect" be saved?

This article is an attempt to reclaim the term "genderlect" as a valuable sociolinguistic concept. It shows that "genderlect" in its traditional sense as a variety according to speaker sex is just as much a myth as are early sociolinguistic theorisations of "women's/men's language". From a postmodernist perspective, genderlects must be seen as stereotypical resources for gendered stylisation practices that are not to be equalled with how women and men actually speak. This is illustrated by using material from a comprehensive study on linguistic gender stylisation in advertising discourse. Moreover, it is suggested that the strictly binary genderlect concept is abandoned and replaced by another one that sees genderlects as heavily context-dependent, community-based and therefore infinite in number. A postmodernist genderlect concept should be able to deal with hegemonic as well as subversive gender styles and at the same time acknowledge that what is generally judged to be hegemonic in one context might be subversive in another (or vice versa).

Effects of Gendered Language on Gender Stereotyping in Computer-Mediated Communication: The Moderating Role of Depersonalization and Gender-Role Orientation

This experiment examined what situational and dispositional features moderate the effects of linguistic gender cues on gender stereotyping in anonymous, text-based computer-mediated communication. Participants played a trivia game with an ostensible partner via computer, whose comments represented either prototypically masculine or feminine language styles. Consistent with the social identity model of deindividuation effects, those who did not exchange brief personal profiles with their partner (i.e., depersonalization) were more likely to infer their partner’s gender from the language cues than those who did. Depersonalization, however, facilitated stereotype-consistent conformity behaviors only among gender-typed individuals; that is, participants conformed more to their masculine- than feminine-comment partners, and men were less conforming than were women, only when they were both gender-typed and depersonalized.

Examining Resource and Protective Factors in the Adjustment of Latino Youth in Low Income Families: What Role Does Maternal Acculturation Play?

This longitudinal study examined whether the risk and positive factors contributing to the delinquent behaviors and internalizing problems of 454 Latino adolescents varied across maternal linguistic acculturation and adolescent gender. Although the level of cumulative risk to which the 10-to-14-year old adolescents were exposed did not vary by maternal linguistic acculturation, the factors contributing to their subsequent adjustment 16 months later varied substantially. Multiple regression analyses showed that for boys, maternal monitoring offset cumulative risk effects in the high acculturation group, but was unrelated to adjustment in the low acculturation group. Social competence served a protective function for boys in the high acculturation group, but was detrimental for boys in the low acculturation group and mother-son relationship quality directly predicted more subsequent delinquent behaviors among boys in the low acculturation group. Maternal monitoring was the only positive factor contributing to girls’ adjustment, directly predicting fewer delinquent behaviors for all girls.