According to a recent study, of the 134 countries listed in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, 54.5% of them speak gendered languages — languages, like French and Spanish, in which nouns, pronouns, and adjectives have a feminine or masculine gender. (English, in case you’re wondering, is one of a a relatively few (9%) “natural gender” languages, which means that “speakers use gender-specific pronouns, but nouns do not have gender.”)
One of the findings of the study was surprising: “On average, countries where gendered languages are spoken ranked lowest on the scale of gender equality…. But surprisingly, genderless languages didn’t fare as well as natural gender languages such as English.” The reason? “Gender-neutral pronouns likely conjure male images.” That result, according to the authors, “suggests that efforts to invent gender-neutral pronouns in English could backfire.”
Sex role and and language reformers in countries with gendered languages have the opposite problem. As Wikipedia reports:
Due to the presence of grammatical gender, their immediate goal in this case is often the exact opposite of that in English: creating feminine job titles rather than eliminating them. As such, “gender-inclusiveness” does not necessarily mean eliminating gender, but rather a use of language which they feel is balanced in its treatment of only two genders. For example, they feel that it is insulting to use the masculine gender for a female professional, for example calling a woman le médecin (the [male] doctor). They feel this would imply that women change gender or became somehow more manly when they went to work. The creation of new job titles for women is often less controversial than language modifications proposed by advocates of gender-neutral language for English, as it is often seen simply as a natural evolution as women have entered more professions.
All of which raises the question I’m sure you’re asking by now: are any of the gendered languages developing a category of transgendered words, or transitional transgendered words (words in transition from one gender to another)?
