Final Blog: Language and Gender - Sarah Seeliger

Language and Gender 

The article I read was about how the language people speak influences the way they think. This article was raising the question of whether or not people who speak a  highly gendered language would find it hard to make a gender-neutral society. In the article, something called "linguistic relativity" was brought up. Linguistic relativity basically means that your language can influence the way you think about things, specifically gender. The article also talked about how language influences our spatial relationships, like what left and right are.

Finally, on to the question: does a highly gendered language make it hard to have a gender - neutral society? According to the article, gender in language is a way to group nouns and pronouns into groups based on the things they have in common. Some languages can have hundreds of classes, but when there are that many classes, they aren't referred to as gender. The word gender is only used when there are two or three classes. Also according to the article, language can have natural gender, grammatical gender, or both. If a language has natural gender, it classifies things corresponds to how they are classified in the real world. For example, classifying animate objects together and inanimate objects together. Another way living things are classified in natural gender is male and female. Grammatical gender is when language has masculine and feminine words for living things but not inanimate things. In conclusion, the article said that language does affect the way people think in small ways.

I can tie this article to when we learned about culture in class, and how language was a big part of culture for essentially all societies. 

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