Generic Masculine Research Articles

Způsoby označování osob z hlediska ne/binarity genderu: kvantitativní sonda do titulních stran vybraných českých periodik

Criticising the use of the generic masculine, feminist and gender linguists have proposed different alternatives. In the Czech context, the following three types of alternatives can be distinguished: (1)Â feminisation, (2)Â neutralisation and paraphrases, and (3)Â making non-binary persons linguistically more visible. Empirical studies on the usage frequency of these alternatives, however, are lacking. This paper addresses this issue by analysing agentive nouns and the feminisation of surnames in selected Czech newspapers. The results show that in references to individual women almost exclusive use is made of feminine expressions. Mixed-gender groups are still largely referred to using the generic masculine. In only a minority of occurrences are neutralising strategies used to refer to persons. What is more common, however, is to find neutralising strategies being used where the intention of expressing gender fairness was probably not the reason for their use, as referring to persons is not their primary function. Neither pair forms nor graphic symbols for non-binary reference are used. The surnames of female foreign nationals are almost always feminised, even though this is not necessary and the texts provide other linguistic means of identifying the persons as women. Based on an analysis of the distribution of generically-intended masculine expressions in the analysed texts, I propose dividing them into two types according to whether or not there is an obvious inclusion of females and non-binary persons.

Feminist Strategies in Qur’ān Translations: A Comparative Study of the Sublime Quran and Saheeh International

For almost thirteen centuries, the Qur’ān had been interpreted by men before it was first translated by a woman. In 1995, Umm Muhammad, Amina Assami, translated the Qur’ān into English under the pseudonym Saheeh International. Extensive research indicates that Umm Muhammad’s translation reproduces patriarchal gender hierarchies (Al-Sowaidi et al., 2021), while Laleh Bakhtiar’s the Sublime Quran comprises feminist elements (Kidwai, 2018). Comparing these two translations to determine whether the translators employ feminist translation strategies to increase their visibility has not been previously addressed. I aim to investigate how these women translators transfer feminine nouns and pronouns and generic masculine nouns from Arabic, a highly gendered language, to English. In this paper, I apply an eclectic approach: the feminist theory by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood and Luise von Flotow and the basic linguistic theory for the grammatical description of language by Roman Jakobson. The results reveal that Bakhtiar’s translation published in the USA demonstrates feminist perspectives through utilising prefacing, supplementing, and neutralisation, whereas Umm Muhammad’s version published in Saudi Arabia depends on exegetical books and maintains a softer tone between the dominant male and diluted feminist voice. Future researchers should broaden the scope of the comparison and cover more Qur’ān translations in different countries to examine the impact of women translators’ socio-cultural contexts on their translations.

Gender Asymmetry of Visegrád Group Languages as Reflected by Word Embeddings

Abstract Today, word embeddings have become a standard method in natural language processing, largely due to the availability of large language corpora. The models effectively reflect the semantic relationships between words without any additional linguistic input. Recently, more emphasis has been placed on interpreting the seemingly discriminatory results of some queries, with the goal of de-biasing language models. However, if we consider the vector space to be a reasonably valid model of a linguistic semantic space, does not the asymmetry and subsequent discrimination in word embeddings reflect the (average) discriminatory tendencies inherent in the language? This article explores word embedding models for the Visegrád group languages and we apply basic vector arithmetic to demonstrate the basic language asymmetry present in the models. It is well known that in English models, vector transfers result in eerily accurate predictions when swapping genders (the famous king – man + woman = queen), but these transfers also result in rather uncomplimentary roles for certain occupations (doctor – man + woman = nurse, or computer programmer – man + woman = homemaker). The article explores similar transfers in models of V4 languages – Slovak, Czech, Polish, and Hungarian. With Hungarian gender neutrality, Polish strong generic masculine, and close parallels between Slovak and Czech, we hope to uncover interesting similarities and differences in gender asymmetry in these languages, based on real language data.

Qualitative analysis of the use of non-sexist language in higher education: the case of the University of Málaga from the professor’s perspective

We live in a fast-changing society where social, economic and cultural changes clearly affect language; therefore, language should be faithfully adjusted to reality to continue fulfilling its function: communication. The problem arises when society advances faster than language research. Currently, the feminine gender only designates women, while the masculine gender has a double use: specific, referring to men, and generic, to refer to both men and women. Consequently, we are usually unaware of whether the language we use is sexist or not and of how it can influence our way of constructing realities and thoughts. Accordingly, educational institutions play a key role in the transmission of values and, since the university context is a pivotal point in the professional and personal development of students, both the content and the language used by teachers must be developed with a non-sexist language. This study aims to investigate the attitudes and opinions of professors towards the use of non-sexist language during the development of the teaching and learning process. The methodology was eminently qualitative, using an in-depth semi-structured interview as a data collection instrument. Professors from different Schools of the University of Málaga (Universidad de Málaga – UMA), specifically from the fields of knowledge ranging from Engineering and Architecture to Social and Legal Sciences, have participated in this study. To complete the study, branches of knowledge were compared from a gender perspective. The results showed some predisposition towards the use of an egalitarian or non-sexist language although most professors systematically use the generic masculine, perhaps by tradition.

Sexist drafting and translation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU

The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (adopted in 2000 and legally binding since 2009) was the object of criticism during its process of drafting, among other issues, on gender grounds for the use of sexist language, the lack of gender mainstreaming, and not having a clearer stance on the support of equality between women and men. This article lists the main amendments that were submitted in this respect. The final version of the Charter was modified to eliminate sexist language in the original English text but not in other language versions, as we will see in the analysis. Based on the European Institute for Gender Equality’s definition of non-sexist use of language as the avoidance of ambiguous masculine gender, we will highlight the appearance of so-called generic masculine in the Charter’s versions in English, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. Finally, a proposal of non-sexist Spanish translation is included with the hope to demonstrate the functional adequacy, simplicity and need to implement non-sexist translation and drafting of an EU text.

Non-binary language in Spanish? Comprehension of non-binary morphological forms: a psycholinguistic study

There is empirical evidence in different languages on how the computation of gender morphology during psycholinguistic processing affects the construction of sex-generic representations. However, there are few experimental studies in Spanish and there is no empirical evidence about the psycholinguistic processing of morphological innovations used as non-binary forms (-x; -e) in contrast to the generic masculine variant (-o). To analyze this phenomenon, we designed a sentence comprehension task. We registered reading times, precision and response times. The results show the specialization of non-binary forms as generic morphological variants, as opposed to the generic masculine. The non-binary forms consistently elicited a reference to mixed groups of people and the response times indicated that these morphological variants do not carry a higher processing cost than the generic masculine. Contrary to what classical grammatical approaches propose, the generic masculine does not function in all cases as generic and its ability to refer to groups of people without uniform gender seems to be modulated by the stereotypicality of the role names.

멕시코 헌법 2021년 개정안의 젠더-포괄적 언어 사용에 대한 어휘-문법적 고찰

On May 11, 2021, Mexico’s Senate approved a constitutional reform that eliminates the sexist expressions varón y mujer (“man and woman”, in English) from articles 30 and 34 of the Constitution and replaces them with the gender-inclusive language concept of personas (“persons” in English) in order to promote gender equality. In recent years there have been published a large number of so-called ‘inclusive language manuals’ in Hispanosphere, so Mexico and Spain are no exceptions. But, as indicated by Bosque(2012), the manuals of Spain and those of Mexico do not make a unified and satisfactory analysis from the linguistic perspective. Based on the examples collected from the the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, we will try to offer an alternative suggestion with respect to some lexical-grammatical issues related to the inadequate use of generic masculine and dual forms of articles and the low frequency of use of epicene nouns.

Geschlechtersensibler Sprachgebrauch im Wahlkampf? Eine diachrone Analyse von TV-Duellen in Deutschland

AbstractIn the last years, gender-sensitive language use has become an important issue of public debate in Germany and many other countries. The generic use of masculine forms in particular has been widely criticised. How, for example, public figures and politicians, both in government and of the opposition, refer to groups comprised of diverse genders is therefore scrutinised by the general public and routinely commented on in the media. In this paper, we analyse the language use of candidates for German chancellor and federal state prime minister, respectively, in televised pre-election debates – i. e. the most important single campaign event – from 1997 to 2020. Focussing on references to voters (Wählerinnen[FEM] orWähler[MASC]) and to citizens (Bürgerinnen[FEM] orBürger[MASC]), we quantitatively investigate the following research questions: Has the use of gender-sensitive expressions increased over the years? Are female candidates more likely to use gender-sensitive language than male candidates? Is there a preference for gender-sensitive language (as opposed to using the generic masculine) among candidates on the left of the political spectrum compared to conservative candidates?

Are Second Person Masculine Generics Easier to Process for Men than for Women? Evidence from Polish

In Polish, it is obligatory to mark feminine or masculine grammatical gender on second-person singular past tense verbs (e.g., Dostałaś list ‘You received-F a letter’). When the addressee’s gender is unknown or unspecified, masculine but never feminine gender marking may be used. The present self-paced reading experiment aims to determine whether this practice creates a processing disadvantage for female addressees in such contexts. We further investigated how men process being addressed with feminine-marked verbs, which constitutes a pragmatic violation. To this end, we presented Polish native speakers with short narratives. Each narrative contained either a second-person singular past tense verb with masculine or feminine gender marking, or a gerund verb with no gender marking as a baseline. We hypothesised that both men and women would read the verbs with gender marking mismatching their own gender more slowly than the gender-unmarked gerund verbs. The results revealed that the gender-mismatching verbs were read equally fast as the gerund verbs, and that the verbs with gender marking matching participant gender were read faster. While the relatively high reading time of the gender-unmarked baseline was unexpected, the pattern of results nevertheless shows that verbs with masculine marking were more difficult to process for women compared to men, and vice versa. In conclusion, even though masculine gender marking in the second person is commonly used with a gender-unspecific intention, it created similar processing difficulties for women as the ones that men experienced when addressed through feminine gender marking. This study is the first one, as far as we are aware, to provide evidence for the male bias of second-person masculine generics during language processing.

Gender Representations Elicited by the Gender Star Form

In many languages, masculine language forms are not only used to designate the male gender but also to operate in a generic fashion. This dual function has been found to lead to male biased representations when people encounter the generic masculine. In German, the now predominant substitute is the gender star form (e.g., Athlet*innen). In two experiments, we examined gender representations elicited when reading the gender star form (vs. generic masculine vs. pair forms). We found that, following the generic masculine, continuations about men (vs. women) were more frequently and more quickly judged to be compatible, replicating the male bias, even though participants were informed about the generic intention. Following the gender star form, a female bias in judgments (both Studies) and speed (only Study 2) occurred, which was somewhat smaller. Representations were most balanced when both male and female forms were mentioned.

Ladies First or Ladies Last: Do Masculine Generics Evoke a Reduced and Later Retrieval of Female Exemplars?

The use of masculine generics (i.e., grammatically masculine forms that refer to both men and women) is prevalent in many languages but has been criticized for potentially triggering male bias. Empirical evidence for this claim exists but is often based on small and selective samples. This study is a high-powered and pre-registered replication and extension of a 20-year-old study on this biasing effect in German speakers. Under 1 of 4 conditions (masculine generics vs. three gender-inclusive alternatives), 344 participants listed 3 persons of 6 popular occupational categories (e.g., athletes, politicians). Despite 20 years of societal changes, results were remarkably similar, underscoring the high degree of automaticity involved in language comprehension (large effects of 0.71 to 1.12 of a standard deviation). Male bias tended to be particularly pronounced later rather than early in retrieval, suggesting that salient female exemplars may be recalled first but that male exemplars still dominate the overall categorical representations.

Preservice Spanish teachers’ perceptions on linguistic sexism: towards the integration of norm and GFL

This article examines preservice Spanish teachers’ perceptions of linguistic sexism, norm, and use in Spanish. Analysis of 723 participants’ answers showed that sexism and linguistic non-adequacy were associated. Results proved that the exclusion of women from the generic masculine in Spanish was considered sexist, and that participants used some Gender Fair Language (GFL) mechanisms to make women visible when deemed necessary, especially with professions. Also, regardless of its adherence to norm, linguistic sexism was perceived as grammatically wrong. Thus, GFL criteria were finding their way into use even if contrary to norm. Therefore, policies based on direct intervention in the training of preservice teachers Spanish as a first language would produce a more egalitarian use of language.

The effect of language on performance: do gendered languages fail women in maths?

Research suggests that gendered languages are associated with gender inequality. However, as languages are embedded in cultures, evidence for causal effects are harder to provide. We contribute to this ongoing debate by exploring the relationship between gendered languages and the gender gap in mathematics achievements. We provide evidence for causality by exploiting the prominent (but not exclusive) practice in gendered languages of using masculine generics to address women. In an experiment on a large representative sample of the Hebrew-speaking adult population in Israel, we show that addressing women in the feminine, compared to addressing them in the masculine, reduces the gender gap in mathematics achievements by a third. These effects are stronger among participants who acquired the Hebrew language early in childhood rather than later in life, suggesting that it is the extent of language proficiency that generates one’s sensitivity to being addressed in the masculine or in the feminine. Moreover, when women are addressed in the masculine, their efforts (in terms of time spent on the maths test) decrease and they report feeling that “science is for men” more than when addressed in the feminine. We supplement the analysis with two experiments that explore the roles of general and task-specific stereotypes in generating these effects.

Gendern im Deutschen

Abstract The terms gendern (< engl. gender) or gendering in German stand for the attempt to establish equality between men and women in everyday life or in political controversy, in academic life by means of linguistic methods. The representatives (plural feminine) of the feminist language criticism/ Feministische Linguistik call for the dissolution of the “generic masculine” for ex. jeder Lehrer (masculine/feminine) means a gender-mixed group whose gender/sex is neither relevant, nor known. It is criticized that the female teacher is not explicitly mentioned. The question here is whether the desired gender-appropriate treatment of all women germ. das Gendern – the gender-conscious use of language – is guaranteed by diacritical-orthographic procedures such as internal I: LehrerInnen (fem. pl.), slash (/): Leser/innen (masc.sg./pl.;/f.pl.), asterisk shape: Lehrer*innen or gender-gap: ein_e Beamt_er_in (an official, m./f. sg.) or by replacement of pair shapes like die Arbeitnehmenden (employees; instead of the ‘classic form’ Arbeitnehmer/Arbeitnehmerinnen) or the participial construction die Fahrzeugführenden/ the vehicle-carrying/ drivers.

El masculino inclusivo en español

The present study critically considers recent proposals that question both the use and the very existence of the so-called generic masculine in Spanish. A model of the grammatical structure of Spanish gender is developed, according to which person masculine nouns (with certain exceptions) do not include semantic information related to sex and are, therefore, epicenes with default gender. It is argued that the use of this Spanish inclusive masculine is not the cause of the invisibility of women in discourse, and that its avoidance is unnecessary and grammatically inconsistent.

Questioning the Usage of Generic Masculine and Reflection of Objective Reality with Regard to the Function of Language (Demonstrated on the Slovak and English Examples)

The English language uses dual gender which is an umbrella term for including fe/males, e.g. student, doctor, teacher, president, minister, opponent, etc. In Slavic languages, e.g. in the Slovak language it works differently. Suffixes reflect grammatical and natural gender of lexemes referring to occupation, activity or the position of a person in the public sphere. And so the gender is recognized by means of a masculine or feminine suffix. In effort to become economical with language and to avoid misunderstandings as well, generic masculine (GM), i.e. preferring dominant masculine gender whereever possible, was introduced in the past. It used to be working for some time without doubting or questioning GM. However, this is no longer true as far as females realize that there is no real existence without their real presence in language. And so what is inherently present in English due to its typological type of language known as analytical, must be reconsidered in some Slavic languages due to their flexive nature. This was investigated by several means: approach of professional language workers for dictionary, appearances of frequencies in the Slovak National Corpus, Google and Census which took place in 2011 in Slovakia. The Census reveals the real numbers of fe/males in their public positions (i.e. occupations and jobs). The analysis and further comparison bring both relevant information and uncover discrepancies between language and reality. It turns out that reality is manipulated via language which has appropriate means to include both genders in public discourse in order to avoid gender stereotypes which are present in more or less sexist society. Remark: In the paper Slovak examples are left without specific Slovak signs in order to avoid misinterpretation by formal publishing mistakes and problems.

<i>Uno</i>

Generic masculines – masculine forms used for women – are employed in many languages, for example English (Mills 2008), French (Coady 2018), Spanish (Bengoechea 2011) and German (Motschenbacher 2016), providing accounts of how gender is made visible in the language through morphological, lexical and syntactic units. These accounts are also linked with how gender is seen in societies and culture, reproducing an imbalance between women and men. Specifically, language discrimination against women is based on the idea that speakers orient themselves towards androcentric language, recognising ‘men’ as a metonym for the group ‘human being’ (Alvanoudi 2014), causing a linguistic invisibility of women.
 
 Similarly, studies in Italian have also discussed the use of masculine forms to refer to, talk about and describe women (Cavagnoli 2013), or have shown how these are used in specialised (Nardone 2016, 2018) or media corpora (Formato 2014, 2016, 2019). This article investigates the use of a specific (and underexamined) generic masculine in Italian – namely, the indefinite pronoun uno.m.sg (in comparison with una.f.sg) labelled ‘impersonal masculine’ (Formato 2019:69) – in three subcorpora of the Perugia Corpus (TV, Web and Spoken; Spina 2014). Uno.m.sg is seen as constructing ‘extended intersubjectivity’, that is, the awareness of a general third party (3rdP) acting as the social bearer of the utterance (Tantucci 2013, 2016, 2017a). The results show that the masculine impersonal uno.m.sg is widely used in the three subcorpora and in several functions, confirming that grammatically gendered language is still employed within a ‘masculine as a norm’ order.

Gender-fair language (GFL) in the academic writing of pre-service teachers of Spanish

ABSTRACT The article analyses the use of GFL in a corpus of 187 academic texts created by pre-service teachers. It reveals how participants reached a balance between the recommendations of GFL guides and the standard normative grammar included in the school curriculum. The study shows that although future teachers are aware of GFL and sensitive to discrimination, they used a combination of the generic masculine with GFL recommendations when deemed necessary. This has great pedagogical potential for the Spanish classroom, together with the potential to transform language and society.

Les attitudes envers le langage inclusif des francophones et leur effet sur l’évaluation d’un texte

La présente étude examine de façon quantitative le lien entre les attitudes envers l’égalité des genres et celles à l’égard du langage inclusif. Elle étudie aussi comment un texte écrit en langage inclusif est évalué, et observe les facteurs pouvant agir sur la façon dont il est considéré. D’abord, des analyses statistiques montrent que les femmes ont des attitudes plus positives envers le langage inclusif que les hommes, et que les personnes habitant une aire francophone autre que la France manifestent des attitudes plus positives que les Français et les Françaises. Ensuite, le texte rédigé en langage inclusif est moins bien évalué, mais semble être aussi bien compris que le même texte au masculin générique. Des analyses supplémentaires montrent une corrélation positive entre les attitudes envers le langage inclusif et l’évaluation du texte, mais seulement lorsque le texte est écrit avec ce type de rédaction. Finalement, les commentaires laissés fournissent de nouvelles perspectives sur l’usage et la réception du langage inclusif des 377 participant-es.

Ohranjen-/a/o v prevodu: spolno občutljiva raba jezika na slovenskem oddelku Generalnega direktorata za prevajanje Evropske komisije

Na slovenskem oddelku Generalnega direktorata za prevajanje Evropske komisije se s spolno občutljivim jezikom ukvarjamo od leta 2016, ko smo opazili vse pogostejšo rabo spolno nevtralnega jezika v angleških izvirnikih. Tak jezik štejemo za namerno izbran način pisanja in torej za pomembno prvino izvirnika. Vendar pa spolno nevtralnega jezika običajno ni mogoče neposredno prevesti v slovenščino, in če spolno nezaznamovane oblike prevajamo z generičnim moškim spolom, je jezik prevoda seksističen. Večinoma je treba spolno nezaznamovanost v prevodu izraziti neodvisno od izvirnika. Slovenski oddelek Generalnega direktorata za prevajanje Evropske komisije je smernice za spolno občutljivo rabo jezika razvil v sodelovanju s strokovnjaki in strokovnjakinjami iz slovenske javne uprave in akademske skupnosti. Nekatera sredstva spolno občutljivega jezika so relativno neproblematična, za mnoga vprašanja pa so potrebne nadaljnje raziskave in izkušnje.