Grammatical Gender In English Language

Grammatical Gender and Linguistic Relativity

Introduction

Grammatical gender is a specific type of noun-classifier system in which all nouns in a language are assigned a gender. Gendered nouns are present in a number of the world’s languages, including the majority of Indo-European languages (although not English). Most languages that gendered nouns divide the genders into several common groupings: masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate. The languages that my study will be concerned with are: English (no genders), French (masculine and feminine genders), Spanish (masc. and fem.), German (masc., fem., and neuter), and Russian (masc., fem., neuter). There have been a number of linguistic studies conducted

There were several interesting correlations as well as differences. “Bridge”, for example, was described as being a more masculine noun by the English speakers, reflected masculine genders in French, Spanish, and Russian. German, on the other hand, assigns “bridge” a feminine gender. Other nouns proved to be more varied among the other languages. “Cliff” was split among them, with French and German assigning it a feminine gender but Spanish and Russian a masculine one. English speakers agreed completely with Spanish and Russian in this case; no feminine adjectives were produced in any substantial amount. As mentioned previously, English speakers were split in regard to the gender of “key”. This is reflected in a split between French and Spanish, which assign “key” a feminine gender; German and Russian in this example both assigned a masculine gender. In regards to “dress”, it is interested to note that although “dress” was describe overwhelming using feminine adjectives by English speakers, it is assigned feminine gender only in the French language. In Spanish the word is masculine, and in German and Russian, “dress” is a neuter noun. “Mountain”, which was described as masculine by most English speakers (but was also not uncommonly given feminine adjectives) disagreed with the other languages’ gender. French, Spanish, and Russian assign “mountain” a feminine gender, but only German assigns a masculine one. The genders assigned by English speakers for the remaining three words, “fork”, “weapon”, and “battle”, were shown to be largely opposite those of the other languages. “Fork” was most often described with masculine adjectives by English speakers, such as ‘pointy’, ‘pronged’, and ‘sharp’. However, “fork” is a feminine word in all other languages except for Spanish, in which it is masculine. “Battle” and