language and gender

Salahaddin University-HawlerCollege of Basic Education(Master of Education/ Linguistics)

A Term Paper about

Language and Gender

Supervised by:

Asst. Prof. Salaam Nawkhosh Baker

Prepared by:

Asmaa Kh. A

(M. A Student in Linguistics First

course)

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2015

Table of Contents

Abstract

Introduction

1. What is gender in language Or Sexist language? 2. From 'sex differences' to gender variation in

sociolinguistics.

3.The Factors of Sexism in the English Language3.1.Religious Factor3.2. Physiological factor3.3.Social Factor3.4.Psychological factor

4.Semantic non-equivalent

5. Differences in men’s and women’s speech 5.1.General Comments5.2. Women talk more/less than men 5.3.Women break the ‘rules’ of turn-taking more than men 5.4. Women use more standard forms than men

1.1.Women’s speech is less direct / assertive than men’s (Powerful and Powerless Language)

5.5.Politeness and gender

6.The Gender Systems of English, Spanish, German, and French7.The gender system in the Kurdish language

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7.1.Gender in Kurmanjî Kurdish7.2.Common gender in Kurdish

Conclusion

References

Abstract

As the title indicates the study deals with genderwithin the language. We also called it as sexism. Sexism inlanguage represents one of the major issues in sociolinguisticstudies. As a phenomenon of society, sexism is reflectedthrough language that expresses inclination in favor of onesex and treats the other one in a discriminatory manner.Characteristically, the bias is in favor of men and againstwomen. Thus, the language is presented as a powerful tool ofpatriarchy. Even though in English speaking countries all thepeople are considered equal, discrimination against womenexists and this fact is observed in language.

The objective of this study is to define the concept ofsexist language; To identify and evaluate the cultural factor,social factor, physiological factor and psychological factorwhich influence the existence of sexism in English language,and showing and explaining the concepts of gender in speechdiscuss if the following differences between men and women inspeech : a) women talk more/less than men; b) women break the

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‘rules’ of turn-taking less than men c)women use more standardforms than men; and d) women’s speech is less direct/assertivethan men’s, and what is the relationship between gender andpoliteness.

The hypothesis is focusing on Kurdish, English-, Spanish-,French-, and German- languages to inanimate objects. Resultsfrom Spanish and French speakers indicated effects ofgrammatical gender on classification; results from Germanspeakers did not. Results showed that there does not seem tobe a distinguishable difference with respect to the usage oflanguage by men and women potentially due to the establishmentof an informal atmosphere and to a sense of solidarity amongparticipants, which enabled them to make use of the code tomaintain conversation. We will identify the role languageplays in the society and how it influences the socialattitudes of human beings.

Introduction

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Observations of the differences between the way males andfemales speak were long restricted to grammatical features,such as the differences between masculine and feminine inmorphology in many languages. However, in the 1970s womenresearchers started looking at how a linguistic codetransmitted sexist values and bias. Lakoff’s work (1975) is anexample of this; she raised questions such as: Do women have amore restricted vocabulary than men? Do they use moreadjectives? Are their sentences incomplete? Do they use more‘superficial’ words? Consequently, researchers started toinvestigate empirically both bias in the language and thedifferential usage of the code by men and women.

Gender can be investigated as (at least) a biological, asocial, and a linguistic category, but there is seldom asimple one-to-one matching of categories at differentontological levels. The focus of this paper lies squarely ongender as a linguistic category

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2. What is Gender (Sex) in language? Or Sexist language

To begin, then, with the first element of our key term: sex.The overwhelming majority of the early work both withinlanguage and gender and within variationist studies of women'sand men's speech took sex as its basic social variable. Unlikeother social variables that preoccupied sociolinguisticinvestigations, this concept was taken to be entirelystraightforward and hence was not seen to require theoreticalexplanation. This situation stands in stark contrast tovariables such as social class, whose operationalization wasand continues to be elaborately discussed and debated (e.g.,Davis 1985; Milroy and Milroy 1992; Rickford 1986).

Sexism, set of attitudes and behaviors towards people thatjudge or belittle them in the basis of their gender, or thatperpetuate stereotypical assumptions about gender roles.Nowadays, the term is most often used to refer to menaceattitude towards women.

Sexist language, or hereafter unnecessarily gendered language, hasbeen defined as “words, phrases, and expressions thatunnecessarily differentiate between females and males orexclude, trivialize, or diminish either gender” (Parks &

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Roberton, 1998a, p. 455). In other words, sexist languagerefers to the use of language expressions in such a way thatit constitutes an unbalanced portrayal of the sexes. Hyde hasdrawn attention to the fact that in a sexist language “he” and“man” refer to everyone. This fact becomes clear when Slovenkoexamines English language stating that except for words thatrefer to female by definition (mother, actress,Congresswoman), and words for occupations traditionally heldby females (nurse, secretary, prostitute), the Englishlanguage defines everyone as male

English countries claim that all people are born equal;there are a lot of inequalities between men and women. It isput stress on this topic because according to sociolinguisticresearch, this inequality is reflected in language and thisphenomena - sexism in language represents one of the majorissues in sociolinguistic studies. According to Hudson, sexismin English languages has existed for a long time, which isreflected of the traditional ethics that men are superior towomen [x; 38]. In this order of ideas, Deborah Cameron’ work,reveals that Men originate from Mars and Women originate fromVenus. Given this evidence, it can be seen that some genderdifferences do exist. Support for this interpretation comesfrom Peter Trudgell, through his work Sociolinguistics: Anintroduction to language and society [7; 100], who confirmsthat males are above females, due to the fact that in the pastthere existed the myth of superiority, when the entire powerwas in the hands of men. Thus, as a special social phenomenon,sexism is inevitably reflected through language and sexism inlanguage reflects sexism in society. But, with the raise ofwomen’s liberation, and the development of mass media, thewhole English words start a social revolution to eliminate thesexism in the English language, because sexism in the Englishlanguage is seen as a discriminating act of women.

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Linguistic Sexism: An Overview of the English Language inEveryday Discourse suggests that sexist language is consideredto be any language that is supposed to include all people, butunintentionally (or not) excludes a gender –this can be eithermales or females. It is clear therefore that a look at sexistlanguage is finding the relation between language and gender.A more plausible explanation for this phenomenon would referto the moment when many people meet difficulties of making thechoices between certain words in their everyday discourses.For instance, they wonder which to choose – the chairman hasarrived for the meeting or the chairperson has arrived whenreferring to a woman. This fact lends weight to the argumentthat a sexist language excludes women and trivializes whatwomen do. Sexist language is especially common in situationsthat describe jobs-common assumptions include that all doctorsare men, all nurses are women, all coaches are men, or allteachers are women. Additionally to this, a sexist languagecan be viewed as an instrument used by the members of thesociety to damage someone. Cameron rightly points out that alanguage can be called sexist if it represents or name theworld from a masculine viewpoint. This means that languageencodes a culture’s values, and in this way reflects sexistculture.

3. From 'sex differences' to gender variation in

sociolinguistics

In the past decades, the sociolinguistic study of gendervariation has taken new directions, both theoretically andmethodologically. This redirection has made the linguisticsubfields of language and gender and variationistsociolinguistics relevant to each other in new ways. Withinsociolinguistics, issues of gender emerged primarily as thestudy of "sex differences," in which the focus of analysis was

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the quantifiable difference between women's and men's use: ofparticular linguistic variables, especially phonologicalvariables. While these questions were vitally important, theirmotivation was often less an interest in women or men per sethan in understanding the social processes that actuate andadvance linguistic change. Consequently, the closerelationship between language and gender and quantitativesociolinguistics in the early years of both subfields becamelooser over time, as scholars pursued separate sets ofquestions with separate theoretical and methodological tools.Researchers whose work contributed to both areas maintainedthe connection between the subfields, and as language andgender studies experienced a burst of renewed activity inrecent years, the effects have been felt in variationistcircles as well. At the same time, current work inquantitative sociolinguistics has opened up a new set ofissues of interest to language and gender scholars.

In-order to accelerate this process of mutual influenceand inspiration, this paper lays out some of .the ways inwhich the two subfields can benefit each other and havealready done so. I open this discussion by scrutinizing thekey term that initiated this shared project: sex differences. Thepaper uncovers the theoretical and methodologicalunderpinnings of this term and traces where new theories andmethods are leading the sociolinguistic study of gendervariation. I illustrate the argument with examples from my ownand others' work on gender, to argue that all sociolinguistsmust understand gender not as a variable that transcendsparticular situations but as a complex and context-specificsystem for producing identities and ideologies.

4. The Factors of Sexism in the English Language

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Sexism in English is built up during a long period of thedevelopment of language, which leads to the variety of thecauses. Thus, in the study An Analysis of Sexism in EnglishLanguage, there are enumerated four factors which cause theappearance of sexism in language:

4.1. Religious FactorAccording to the Holy Bible (The Books of The Old

Testament), God created man first of all, while woman madefrom one of man’s ribs was created just as a help meet for him[Holy Bible]. From the order of the birth, it is obvious tosee the different importance of man and woman. Thus, man andwoman are not equal at all because woman is only a part ofman, which itself is the discrimination against women.Additionally to this, it is known the fact that the first sinwas also committed by the woman. Consequently, the woman waspunished to bring forth children in pain and was ruled over bythe man. These two examples reveal the superiority of men andinferiority of women. In fact, the Holy Bible is actually abook of men and as Christianity is such a powerful religion inWestern countries, it is clear therefore that this religiousfactor consolidate the inferiority of women.

4.2. Physiological factor

Due to the fact that men are stronger than women fromphysiological point of view, it can be stated that this factdetermines that men play a more and more important role insocial and economic lives. A man’s job is to work outside buta woman’s job is to stay at home, do the housework and takecare of the children. Women are treated as the weaker ones andthey realize their own values through their marriages to men.At last, women are lower in status. They have to leech on tomen and are dominated by men. Gradually, people begin to

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discriminate women and think that they are inferior inintelligence. This wrong perspective reflects in language.

4.3.Social Factor

Feminists all claim that we live in a patriarchal society:a society of men, ruled by men and for men. Patriarchy depictsmen as the perfect norm against which women are measured andfound lacking. Both the Western and Eastern societies use sex,to one degree or another, in allocating tasks, activities,rights, and responsibilities. As for the job done by men andwomen, there is a long stereotyped notion of what they can do.In history, there has been a division of labor-a division inwhich women’s place was restrained at home for housework andchild-care while men worked outside being the breadwinner. Atlast, men had dominance over women, and women had to bedependent on men. This was the turning point for women. Thusthe sexism in the society has been in existence, theembodiment of which is necessarily the sexism of language.Guimei He in his work An Analysis of Sexism in English addsthat this factor is in a strong correlation with labordivision.

4.4. Psychological factor

Because of the social and cultural factors, women arealways considered to be the weak. People treat women asinferior to men. They educate men to be manly, decisive, andbrave while women are required to be polite, conservative,obedient, and gentle. Because women are in subordinate statusin the society, they have to constrain their emotion and giveup their own need to meet the satisfaction of men. As timepasses, when speaking women pay more attention to the eleganceand standard of language than men. They use more pleasant and

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polite words in the hope that they can receive other’sapproval. And they are taught to speak softly, to avoidcontradicting others, to be obedient in communication, and tobe aware of giving cues of strong confidence. They moundthemselves to be inferior in their potential subconsciousness. Therefore, women try their best to strengthentheir social status through their speech than men do. Thisalso suggests that women are in a lower position in thesociety.

Additionally to this, Xiang Xu in his study The Sexism inEnglish and Its Rebuilding claims that history developmentalso had a strong influence to the appearance of sexism inlanguage. Thus, he exemplifies that from ancient time on, theruling position in western society is almost held by malepersons. After climbing to the high position, men began tolook down upon women. This attitude could influence theideology of the whole society. So lots of men-central termswith sexist’s color came into being during the stage ofEnglish forming. In the 14th century, Chaucer, who isconceived as the Father of English language, created a greatdeal of terms, later, Milton and Shakespeare competitivelyinvented new words. They contributed a lot to English, at thesame time; the negative side they brought can’t be ignored.These famous male’s contribution to English who were living inmale’s society, accelerated the extensive transmission of thelanguage of sexism.

5. Semantic non-equivalences

These are pairs of terms that historically differentiated bysex alone, but which, over time, have gained differentconnotations (e.g. of status or value) and in some casesdifferent denotations. Examples include:

Mrs, Ms/Mr;

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Miss/Master, Mr; Mistress/master; Governess/governor; Spinster/bachelor; Tomboy/sissy; Lady/Lord; Lady/gentleman; Dame/knight; Bride/(bride)groom; Madam/sir; Queen/king; Matron/patron; Husband/wife; Author/authoress; Dog/bitch.

6. Differences in men’s and women’s speech 6.1. General CommentsThe issue of women interacting differently from men has been

discussed for hundreds of years. However, feminist movementsin the 1960s realized that language was one of the instrumentsof female oppression by males. As a matter of fact, languagenot only reflected a patriarchal system but also emphasizedmale supremacy over women. Most of the works analyzinglanguage were to do mostly with male language production.Labov’s works (1972a, 1972b), for instance, described mostlythe speech of men. However, other linguists, such as the onescited below, started to become interested in observabledifferences in language production depending on the sex of thespeakers.

6.2. Women talk more/less than men

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According to Cameron and Coates (1985), the amount we talkis influenced by who we are with and what we are doing. Theyalso add that if we aggregate a large number of studies, itwill be observed that there is little difference between theamount men and women talk. On the one hand, in a recent study,Dr. Brizendine (1994) states that women talk three times asmuch as men. On the other hand, Drass (1986), in an experimenton gender identity in conversation dyads found that men speakmore than women.

6.3. Women break the ‘rules’ of turn-taking less than menStudies in the area of language and gender often make use

of two models or paradigms - that of dominance and that ofdifference. The first is associated with Dale Spender (1980),Pamela Fishman (1980), Don Zimmerman and Candace West (1975),while the second is associated with Deborah Tannen (1984).Dominance can be attributed to the fact that in mixed-sexconversations, men are more likely to interrupt than women. Ituses a fairly old study of a small sample of conversations,recorded by Don Zimmerman and Candace West at the SantaBarbara campus of the University of California in 1975. Thesubjects of the recording were white, middle class and under35. Zimmerman and West produce in evidence 31 segments ofconversation. They report that in 11 conversations between menand women, men used 46 interruptions, but women only two. Thedifference theory was also summarized in Tannen’s book You justdon’t understand (1990) in an article in which she represents maleand female language use in a series of six contrasts:

• Status vs. supportThis claims that men grow up in a world in which

conversation is competitive - they seek to achieve the upperhand or to prevent others from dominating them. For women,

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however, talking is often a way to gain confirmation andsupport for their ideas. Men see the world as a place wherepeople try to gain status and keep it. Women see the world as“a network of connections seeking support and consensus”.

• Independence vs. intimacyIn general, women often think in terms of closeness and

support, and struggle to preserve intimacy. Men, concernedwith status, tend to focus more on independence. These traitscan lead women and men to starkly different views of the samesituation

• Advice vs. understandingDeborah Tannen claims that, to many men a complaint is a

challenge to find a solution:

“When my mother tells my father she doesn't feel well, heinvariably offers to take her to the doctor. Invariably, sheis disappointed with his reaction. Like many men, he isfocused on what he can do, whereas she wants sympathy.”(Tannen 1984:180)

• Information vs. feelingsCulturally and historically speaking, men's concerns were

seen as more important than those of women, but today thissituation may be reversed so that the giving of informationand brevity of speech are considered of less value thansharing of emotions and elaboration.

• Orders vs. proposalsIt is claimed that women often suggest that people do

things in indirect ways - “let's”, “why don't we?” or“wouldn't it be good, if we...?” Men may use, and prefer tohear, a direct imperative.• Conflict vs. compromise

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This situation can be clearly observed in work-situationswhere a management decision seems unattractive - men willoften resist it vocally, while women may appear to accede, butcomplain subsequently. In fact, this is a broad generalization- and for every one of Deborah Tannen's oppositions, we willknow of men and women who are exceptions to the norm.

6.4. Women use more standard forms than menIn the literature, Trudgill (1972) found a kind of sex

differentiation for speakers of urban British English. Hisstudy demonstrated that “women informants”… use formsassociated with the prestige standard more frequently thanmen”. His study also discovered that male speakers place ahigh value on working class nonstandard speech. He offersseveral possible reasons for the finding that women are morelikely to use forms considered correct: (1) The subordinateposition of women in English and American societies makes it“more necessary for women to secure their social statuslinguistically”; and (2) while men can be rated socially onwhat they do, women may be rated primarily on how they appear– so their speech is more important. As for Americanliterature, research has not shown a noticeable difference interms of the usage of standard forms by men and women.

6.5. Women’s speech is less direct/ assertive than men’s (Powerful and Powerless Language)In 1975, Robin Lakoff published an influential account of

women’s language in her book entitled Language and Woman’s Place.In another article she published a set of basic assumptionsabout what marks the language of women. Among them she madesome claims those women:• Hedge: using phrases like “sort of”, “kind of”, “it seemslike”, and so on.

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• Use (super) polite forms: “Would you mind...”, “I'dappreciate it if...”, “...if you don't mind”.• Use tag questions: “You're going to dinner, aren't you?”• Speak in italics: into national emphasis equal tounderlining words - so, very, quite.• Use empty adjectives: divine, lovely, adorable, and so on• Use hypercorrect grammar and pronunciation: English prestigegrammar and clear enunciation.• Use direct quotation: men paraphrase more often.• Have a special lexicon: women use more words for things likecolors, men for sports.• Use question intonation in declarative statements: womenmake declarative statements into questions by raising thepitch of their voice at the end of a statement, expressinguncertainty. For example, “What school do you attend? EtonCollege?”• Use “wh-” imperatives: (such as, “Why don't you open thedoor?”)• Speak less frequently• Overuse qualifiers: (for example, “I think that...”)• Apologize more: (for instance, “I'm sorry, but I thinkthat...”)• Use modal constructions: (such as can, would, should, ought- “Should we turn up the heat?”)• Avoid coarse language or expletives• Use indirect commands and requests: (for example, “My, isn'tit cold in here?” - really a request to turn the heat on orclose a window)• Use more intensifiers: especially so and very (for instance,“I am so glad you came!”)• Lack a sense of humor: women do not tell jokes well andoften don't understand the punch line of jokes.

(Lakoff, 1975:45-79)

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Holmes (2001) and O´Barr and Atkins (1998) have bothconstructed similar lists of Lakoff’s work on “women’slanguage”. As can be noted, some of these statements areeasier to verify by investigation and observation than others.It is easy to count the frequency with which tag questions ormodal verbs occur. However, Lakoff's remark about humor ismuch harder to quantify - some critics might reply thatnotions of humor differ between men and women. In their study,O’ Barr and Atkins (1980) looked into courtroom cases andwitnesses' speech. Their findings challenge Lakoff's view ofwomen's language. Doing some research in what they describe as“powerless language”, they show that language differences arebased on situation-specific authority or power and not gender.It is also evident that there may be social contexts wherewomen are (for other reasons) more or less the same as thosewho lack power. As a matter of fact, this is a far morelimited claim than that made by Dale Spender (1980), whoidentifies power with a male patriarchal order - the theory ofdominance.As a result of their study, O'Barr and Atkins (1980) concludedthat the quoted speech patterns were neither characteristic ofall women nor limited only to women. Therefore, the women whoused the lowest frequency of women's language traits had anunusually high status (according to the researchers). Theywere well educated professionals with middle classbackgrounds. A corresponding pattern was noted among the menwho spoke with a low frequency of women's language traits.O'Barr and Atkins tried to emphasize that a powerful positionmight derive from either social standing in the larger societyand/or status accorded by the court.

6.6. Politeness and gender

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Holmes (1995:2) states that women and men perceiveconversations differently. In general, women see talking assomething important; they think of language as a means ofestablishing and maintaining relationships. Men, on the otherhand, tend to use conversations to receive and conveyinformation; thus, they see language as a tool for this. Inother words, the focus in men’s conversation is on the contentand it seems that they do not think of the feelings of otherswhereas women’s focus is on the feelings of their conversationpartner. The different kinds of focus demonstrate twodifferent functions of speech: referential function where speech isused to convey information; and affective function where speech isused to convey feelings and reflect social relationships(ibid:3).

Holmes (1995:6) suggests that women think of/focus on otherpeople’s feelings.Consequently, her conclusion is that women are more politethan men because they tend to express politeness orfriendliness in their way of using language. Other authors,such as Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2003:143), concur withHolmes, claiming that men are more competitive and competitiondoes not involve politeness. In contrast, women showtendencies to be more cooperative which leads them to careabout other people’s feelings.

However, there are authors who question this view ofgender influencing language. Brown (1998:83) suggests that itis not only gender which has a role in expressing politeness.She mentions the social network which is a group of people wherethe members have established ways of talking. Examples ofsocial networks are colleagues at work; classmates and familymembers. The social network is as important as other factors.Thus, if a person uses Can you… in a group of friends, it doesnot necessarily mean that the person is being impolite. It mayrather be that the less polite form is the one used in thatgroup. Moreover, there are communicative strategies and social

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motivations which influence our speech (Brown 1998:83). Brownclaims that we need to have these factors in mind when wediscuss gender and language because people are rational actorsand we tend to adapt to different contexts and networks(ibid:83). For example, if we are having a meeting with ourboss, we would use the more polite form whereas if we have afamily meeting around the kitchen table, we would probably usethe less polite form. Brown (ibid:84) further discussesfactors which “seem to be involved” in our decision ofappearing polite. One example is the factor of beingsuperior/inferior in the interaction. If we consider theexample above with the meeting with a boss, the employee wouldprobably appear polite because the boss is superior.

7. The Gender Systems of English, Spanish, German, andFrenchEnglish codes natural gender primarily hrough lexical items

(e.g., girl–boy, brother–sister, and aunt–uncle) and throughsome pronouns (e.g., she–he and him– her). English does notassign a gender to all nouns that refer to animates (e.g.,doctor) or to nouns that refer to inanimates (e.g., apple).Languages such as Spanish, however, have a grammatical gendersystem because they mark gender with morphological informationthat is carried by pronouns, determiners, nouns, andadjectives. One way linguistic gender systems differ from eachother is by the number of grammatical categories that carrygender information. For example, whereas Spanish pronouns,determiners, nouns, and adjectives all frequently carry gendermarkings, only German pronouns and determiners are marked forgender consistently. Languages that mark gendermorphologically across several grammatical categories areoften described as being “gender loaded.” Another differenceacross languages with grammatical gender systems is the numberof grammatical “gender” categories that they have. Some

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languages have no grammatical gender categories (e.g.,English), some have 2 (e.g., Spanish and French), some have 3(e.g., German and Greek), and some have nearly 20 (e.g., Thaiand Sesotho). Of course, in a language with 20 noun classes,the degree to which the noun-based agreement rules actuallymark gender is questionable.

The Spanish grammatical gender system works as follows.All Spanish nouns have a grammatical gender. Moreover, theSpanish words for boy, brother, and male cat—nin˜o, hermano,and gato— all have the same stem as the Spanish words forgirl, sister, and female cat: nin˜a, hermana, and gata. Theydiffer in that the Spanish words those refer to males endin /o/ and the Spanish words that refer to females end in /a/.Therefore, many Spanish words that refer to the same categoryof people (and animals) often differ only in theirmorphological ending. For words that refer to animals andpeople, then, the Spanish morphological endings are a good,albeit imperfect, cue to natural gender. Nouns that do notrefer to animals or people share the same morphologicalendings as nouns that mark the natural gender of males andfemales. Unlike many of the nouns that refer to animals orpeople, however, there is only one noun form for words thatrefer to inanimate objects. For example, the Spanish word for“table,” mesa, is feminine, and the Spanish word for“telescope,” telescopio, is masculine. Other components ofSpanish noun phrases are also marked for gender. Singular andplural definite and indefinite articles each have masculineand feminine forms. So one would say una nin˜a when referringto “a girl” and un nin˜o when referring to “a boy.” ManySpanish adjectives also carry information about grammaticalgender. Thus, the Spanish translations of “tall” when saying“a tall girl” and “a tall boy,” una nin˜a alta and un nin˜oalto, are also marked for gender. The Spanish language, then,is a language that is loaded with grammatical gender markings

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because the articles, nouns, and adjectives typically carrymorphological gender information

German, like Spanish, possesses a grammatical gendersystem. However, the German system differs from the Spanishsystem in three ways. First, instead of having just two gendercategories, the German has a third, neuter, and category. Forexample, the German translations of “the man,” “the woman,”and “the girl” are der Mann (masculine) die Frau (feminine),and das Ma¨dchen (neuter), respectively. It should be clearthat the relation between grammatical gender and naturalgender in German is imperfect, because different articles areused for “the woman” and “the girl.” Moreover, the Germanindefinite article only sometimes carries grammatical genderinformation. For example, among ein Mann, eine Frau, and einMa¨dchen, only eine Frau is distinguished from the others byits indefinite article. Another difference between the Spanishand German gender systems is that German determiners mark caseas well as gender. Consider the German translations of “theman” in the sentences “The man scratched the cat” (Der Mannkratzt die Katze) and “The cat scratched the man” (Die Katzekratzt den Mann). In these sentences, the determiner of “man”changes as the man’s thematic role changes. So the Germandeterminers carry information about case and gendersimultaneously.

A third difference between the Spanish and German gendersystems is that not as many grammatical categories carrygender information in German. German determiners (e.g.,definite and indefinite articles) carry information aboutgrammatical gender most frequently and consistently. Nouns arerarely marked for gender. Adjectives are marked forgrammatical gender in some cases. For example, the Germantranslation of “tall,” when used to describe the tall man (Dergroße Mann), the tall woman (die große Frau), and the tallgirl (das große Ma¨dchen), is the same across all three gendercategories. We thus asked whether grammatical gender effects

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would be observed among speakers of German, a language whosegender system varies in several ways from Spanish.

The French and Spanish systems are similar to each otherin three ways. First, both French and Spanish possess twogender categories. Second, neither Spanish nor French is acase-based system. The French and Spanish translations of “thegirl” are the same in sentences such as “The girl hit the boy”and “The boy hit the girl.” Third, articles, nouns, andadjectives in French and Spanish carry morphological genderinformation, so both languages are gender loaded. The Frenchand Spanish systems differ from each other in that some nounsthat are classified in one language according to one genderare classified in the opposite way by the other language(e.g., bed is feminine in Spanish but masculine in French).This difference between the Spanish and French gender systemsoffers a naturally occurring “manipulation” of grammaticalgender. So we asked whether Spanish and French speakers agreeon the classification of objects that are assigned the samegenders by French and Spanish and disagree on theclassification of items that are assigned different genders.

8. The gender system in the Kurdish language

8.1. Gender in Kurmanjî Kurdish

The following sketch is based entirely on the Kurmanjîdialect of Kurdish. The situation in Soranî, or CentralKurdish, is very different with regard to grammatical gender,but I will not be going into these differences here. In theinterests of brevity I will occasionally talk simply of"Kurdish", which in this context is merely convenientshorthand for "Kurmanjî Kurdish". Kurdish has two grammaticalgenders, traditionally termed masculine and feminine. To myknowledge, none of the existing grammars feel the need to

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elaborate on this statement, so that one is left with theimpression that gender in Kurdish is similar to other two-gender (masc./fem.) languages, e.g. Romance languages. But infact gender in Kurdish operates rather differently from morefamiliar languages. In this section I will very briefly sketchthe formal features of Kurdish gender, before proceeding tooutline what makes it a little more complex than it appears atfirstGlance Gender in Kurdish (the Kurmanjî dialects spoken in Turkey) is manifested in the following two parts of the grammar: the oblique case markers, and the ezafe-particles:

Table 1: Formal indications of gender in Kurmanjî KurdishGENDER CASE MARKING (OBLIQUE) EZAFE-PARTICLEMASCULINE vî bajar-î ‘this town (OBL)’ ap-ê min ‘my uncle’FEMININE vê keçik-ê ‘this girl (OBL)’ keç-a min ‘my daughter’

Thus the grammar clearly differentiates between two distinct classesof nouns, therefore complying with the definition of gender given in §1.Furthermore, we find that nouns referring to females are regularly foundin one class, while those referring to males are regularly found in theother. However, this is not the whole story. Before going on to examinethe typologically unusual feature of gender in Kurdish, namely thephenomenon of common gender, I will briefly discuss two other features ofgender in Kurdish which render its analysis rather more complicated: (i)The phonetic, or perceptual aspect; and (ii) the problem of dialectalvariation.

8.2. Common gender in KurdishIf gender is a property of individual words, and that is

the general assumption in linguistic treatment of gender, theneach word has a single, immutable gender. For example, the

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German word Tisch ‘table’ is masculine, and its masculine genderaccompanies it in all contexts, determining the types ofinflection it takes, and determining the type of agreementfound on related words. It cannot change its gender.

However, in Kurdish we find a large number of words ofapparently indeterminate gender. For example, the word heval‘friend’ can take both the masculine and the feminine ezafeforms, depending on what is meant:

(3) Rojek me keçeke hevala wê anî malê û me got'ê: […]‘One day we brought a daughter of her friend home and we saidto her: […]’(From Bozarslan, M. Emîn. Meyro)

So the Kurdish word heval is compatible with either set ofezafe endings; the choice is determined by the intendedmeaning of the word in a particular context. Words of thistype are rather common in Kurdish:

dost ‘friend’ cîran ‘neighbour’ karker ‘worker’ zarok ‘child’ guhdar ‘listener’ mamûr ‘official, civil servant’ mêvan ‘guest’ şagirt ‘student’

Interestingly, this type of fluid gender also applies toanimals. For example, hesp ‘horse’ can be used with bothmasculine and feminine inflectional forms (although there is anadditional word mehîn used for mare). A nice example is the useof the word for donkey, ker, in the following text excerpt:

(4) Me bi ev [sic] peran kerek kirî […] Ew kera ha. Delala hemû malê bû; li havînê ewê dehşek anî.

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‘We bought a donkey with this money […] that donkey-FEM. (It) became the darling of the whole household, in summer she had afoal.’(From Şemo, Ereb. 1977. Şivanê kurd. Istanbul: Ozgürlük, p. 12)

Evidently, words for culturally significant animals such as donkeys and horses can be used in either gender. Likewise, theword for fox can appear in the feminine:(5) Rovîyek hebû. Lê çi rovî! […] Rovîya dekzan […] bersîva wan da:‘There was once a fox. But what a fox! […] The crafty fox-FEM answered them: […]’

(from Bozarslan, E. Emîn. Gurê Bilurvan. Borهs: Invandrarf ِrlaget, p. 7.)

Bedîr Khan and Lescot (1986: 61-62) recognize the problem of words such as heval ‘friend’, but consider them to be basically masculine. However, from a linguist’s point of view, this is difficult to justify for the following reasons: Generally, gender is conceived of as a fixed property of individual words, defined by the type of grammatical constructions they may occur in. In Kurdish, these environments are the two sets of inflectional affixes (ezafe and oblique case). If a large number of words can appear in either type of grammatical construction without any overt change in the form of the word, then we really have no principled way of deciding which gender that word has.5 The situation in Kurdish contrasts sharply with that in other Indo- European languages with gender such as German or Spanish.In these languages we find that the feminine sense of a word like friend or teacher is rendered by creating a new word, e.g. German Freund / Freundin ‘friend m./f.’, or Spanish profesor /. profesora ‘teacher m./f.’. Kurdish, however, allows one and the same word to be used with different sets of inflection.6 I willrefer to these words, following Corbett (1991), as words of common gender.

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The words of common gender in Kurdish constitute a veryclear semantic group, which we may define as follows:

(6) Semantic characteristics of words of common gender inKurdish:

All words which refer to entities which are sex-differentiable, i.e. for which a sex distinction can be made,but which have no inherently fixed gender, have common gender.This definition excludes words where a particular gender is aninherent part of their meaning, e.g. female sex is part of theinherent meaning of the word xuşk ‘sister’, and male sex isinherently part of the word ap ‘uncle’. Words of this type havewhat is referred to as lexical gender. The Kurdish nominallexicon can be divided into three distinct semantic classes,each with a particular type of gender assignment:

Table 2: Semantic classes of nouns and principles of gender assignment

Semantic class Type of gender Gender assignmentanimate and sex differentiable common gender changes according to the(e.g. heval ‘friend’) intended meaning of the

word in a particular context

animate with fixed, inherent lexical gender fixed according to thesex (e.g. xuşk ‘sister’) lexical semantics of the word

inanimates (e.g. qelem

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‘pen’)fixed, principles of gender assignment appear to be

arbitrary

Conclusion

The difference of language between subjects was not related to gender potentially due to other factors such asthe solidarity between participants, where men and women had equal opportunities to express themselves during the conversation and the familiarity with the topic.

the researcher does not wish to reiterate that male-femaleinteraction will invariably exhibit relatively symmetric patterns as it was reported in this paper with respect to women’s and men’s speech

the conditions under which sex roles become relevant to the conduct of conversationalists and when sex-linked differences in conversational interaction emerge is the specification of conditions under which they occur

The research showed both stability and variability in the relation between sexist beliefs and attitudes toward gender-neutral language.

The aim of this essay was firstly to investigate differences in the way men and women express politeness byusing the phrases Could you and Can you. Secondly, these differences were to be identified and clarified. Which menand women tend to express politeness similarly.

We found that the judgments of Spanish and French speakersvaried systematically and predictably with variations in gender assignments across the two languages. We found thatthe German grammatical gender system does not influence classifications among German speakers in the same way the Spanish and French systems do

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. Grammatical gender as a system of formal distinctions ina language is not directly related to the manifestation ofgender as a social category.

Kurdish language The key difference (gender) is the presence in Kurdish of an extensive and systematic group of nouns. Gender as a social and cultural set of beliefs can be fruitfully investigated through the way in which particular forms in the language are deployed by speakers.

Sexism in language is a social problem, which reflects thesocial reality and social division of population. On account of the differences between their superiority and inferiority in social activities, men and women are differentiated from each other in many aspects, which giverise to variations in their styles and language uses. Thatis why, language was and is seen as a powerful instrument of patriarchy.

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