Libertie, Equalitie, and... More Equalitie?
Photo by Flickr user philippe leroyer. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Heidi Harley of Language Log says (italics hers)
Last week, Dalila Ayoun, of the Department of French and Italian here at the University of Arizona, gave a talk in our linguistics colloquium series in which she dropped a bombshell: native French speakers don't know the genders of French nouns!
OK, that's not quite right: it would be more appropriate to say that native French speakers don't agree on the genders of French nouns. They really don't agree. Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns.
...
Ayoun was investigating second-language learning of grammatical gender in French -- a major difficulty for learners from non-gender languages like English. She had constructed a couple of tasks: grammaticality judgments of sentences where there was a gender agreement mismatch, and a gender-assignment task, where subjects were given a noun and had to choose among "masculine", "feminine", "both", or "I don't know".
In both tasks, to her great surprise, she found a great deal of disagreement among her native-speaker controls! In these tasks, there is always a normatively 'correct' answer -- French dictionaries and textbooks all agree on what the genders of nouns are, and how gender agreement in sentences should turn out -- in the same way they agree on how to form relative clauses, and how to form passives, and where to put clitic pronouns, and so on. Native speakers would be expected to perform close to ceiling on this grammatical task, as on others. But, surprisingly, they don't.
There's an even more interesting twist in Ayoun's native-speaker results. Her native speakers fell into two groups: 14 adult speakers and 42 teenage speakers. On most grammatical tasks, for all intents and purposes, teenagers' native-language abilities are identical to adults' abilities. But when she broke down the gender-assignment task results by age, she found that teenagers showed considerably more variation than the adults. On the 50 feminine nouns, for example, the 14 adults all agreed on 21 of them, while the 42 teenagers agreed on only one: cible, 'target'. Of the 93 masculine nouns, the adults agreed on 51 of them, while all adults and teenagers agreed on only 17 (of 93!!)
Harley points out that Ayoun's specific goal was to study *secondary* language acquisition skills, not native language skills, and so "There are many questions one would like to ask ... answers to most of them will have to await further experimentation." I'll say!
One interesting question would be whether, say, the sources are just wrong and have been all along. Another (very interesting) question would be whether gender assignment varies according to political or social/interpersonal affiliations. And a third, related to the variation between young people, would be whether gender might be normalizing enough that young people don't give a crap whether accordions and erasable/programmable read-only memory chips are male, female, or neutral, nor interested in circumstances usage might alter the gender pronouns for those things. Or, conversely, is the official order of things perhaps *more* egalitarian than common usuage?
Also, I have to say that since gender-flapping was always one of my biggest issues when I've tried to learn languages I'm extraordinarily heartened to learn that future generations, at least, might be less oppressed by the foolish things. And at least for now I'm much more heartened when it comes to considering learning French since I could always say my teenage friends from France don't bother to be consistent so why should I? (Yes, yes, "cultural imperialism much, figleaf?" Eh. In this particular case I have no problem playing such games with other 1st-world cultures that, at least at times, have higher standards of living, higher standards of education, higher quality and lower cost health care, longer life-spans, better labor conditions, and café culture out the wazoo. :-) )
[Note: When I go looking for illustrations for my posts I just search Flickr for associated keywords to see what turns up. In this case I used "French" and "gender" to get what at least looks like a banner from a trans-gender rally. And I have to say that languages even more gendered than English must be *especially* difficult for intersexed, trans, and gender-queer people. Finally, by complete coincidence, this happens to be the topic at hand this week in my interpersonal communication theory / women's studies / sex education course. I'd like to say I knew the Language Log post was relevant to that all along but I only just made that connection. But if I can I will bring it up in class. --fl]
I am so behind, ever since your RSS feed was acting up. Since when are you in school??
[Hi Amber! Since January. It's a mostly-intro-level integrated studies program combining interpersonal communication theory, women's studies, and sex education, and while I know some of the stuff from old course, and others from nearly a decade of forum/blogging online activity, I've never had *formal* introductions to any of that at a college level. It's just one quarter, and the whole Kremlinology nature of guessing exactly how they want us to answer tests is as irksome, but I'm totally enjoying it and want more. So grad schools may be in my near future if I can find an appropriate program. --fl]
I'd expect that, as you posit, gender assignment varies according to political or social/interpersonal affiliations. If, for political or social reasons, you aren't wedded to a "traditional" view of gender roles/identities/whatever, it makes sense to me that you'd be less dogmatic about applying the "correct" grammar.
I wish I knew some French teens to ask. The teens I know are American and British, so that's not much help. But hey, use your mythical teenage friends from France as an excuse! I know I blame my IM chats with my teenage Brit relatives for lazy spelling. :)
I also meant to ask: have you mentioned this blog, either generally or specifically, to your classmates?
[I actually haven't mentioned it, in part because I'm an *anonymous* blogger, also in part because none of them have chosen to disclose whether *they* have blogs. :-) I'll mention it to at least one of my professors when the course is complete but I just don't feel like it's relevant in a classroom context. Thanks, L. --fl]
They were talking about this very thing on the radio here a few months ago. The DJs were asking why on earth arbitrary words are gendered and what makes something masculine or feminine anyway? Rather amusingly it happened that vagina turned out to be a masculine noun - after which the DJs pronounced the whole language a farce! lol.
I have to disagree with you this time. Gender in language is only loosely related to gender in people. (Fact of the day: in many languages that have genders, they are not masculine, feminine or neuter. This is why linguists sometimes call them "noun classes" instead.) For this reason, I really doubt society becoming more equal will do anything to gender systems in languages. (And language having a gender system absolutely isn't what's making society unequal.)
So if native speakers don't agree on the genders of their words, I dare say it's probably NOT because they're making associations between feminine words and female people. More likely, it's for the same reason why native English speakers don't agree on the plural of ox (oxen or oxes?) or the correct third person pronoun for when somebody's sex is unknown (he, he or she, they?) or the spelling of the word colour (colour or color?) or what 'hopefully' means. Which is, because languages tend to develop variation. They always have - so I suspect that Frenchmen not agreeing on genders probably isn't a new phenomenon at all.
What is written in dictionaries and textbooks about the gender of nouns or word order, is just the norms of the standard written language, not the language as it is. The dialects and other spoken varieties can be very different from it (and each other!). For some reason, non-native speakers are often surprised by the difference, declaring that people X can't even speak their own language, and completely ignoring that the same thing happens in *their* language!
Children learn the norms of the standard language in school, which could explain why the teenagers in the study expressed more variation than adults. They haven't completed their education yet. English-speaking teenagers probably make more spelling mistakes than adults, as well.
I hope this post isn't too incoherent. I need to run, now.
native English speakers don't agree on ... the spelling of the word colour (colour or color?)
Hmm, while native USAian speakers of English might agree on "color", native English speakers of English would almost universally agree on "colour". And the two spellings are not interchangeable - spelling colour without a 'u' when writing to a British person would make one appear to be either ignorant, lazy, or "an arrogant Yank" (our prejudices about USAians being what they are). Spelling color with a 'u' in the USA will appear either quaint, ignorant, or British (I think Canadians also use the "colour" spelling?). In both cases, they will almost certainly be marked as incorrect by a proof-reader or teacher.
"Hopefully" has different meanings depending on context and inflection, but less so depending on the listener; for example, "hopefully" in "she will travel hopefully" has a different meaning from "hopefully" in, "she will travel - hopefully!" The first form means "she will have a feeling of hope as she travels", while the second means "I/we hope that she will travel".
Inasmuch as different people attach different connotations to words, then yes, the same word can have different meanings to different people speaking the same language; but when the word's meaning is so different as to be unintelligible to the other person, then arguably they are already speaking a different language from each other (for example, "formidable" means different things to a Brit and to a French person).
According to a linguistics primer I've been reading, it is also arguable that spoken and written English are in effect two different languages, since spoken English does not obey all the same grammatical structures as written English, and the phrasing of speech is rarely translated accurately onto the page when writing.
[I remember working with some voice-to-text computer programmers who mentioned the same thing, SE. You evidently can't just plug in the formal rules of some language -- English especially but this Language Log post suggests maybe others as well -- into a parsing tree and expect everything spoken to just roll out onto the page. --fl]
Canadians do indeed use 'colour' and all the other British spellings.
[Yes, colour, flavour, and centre.... I'm pretty sure Canadian-English defaults to British spellings. Thanks, Vistana. --fl]
I don't think there's any sociopolitical thing going on, I think it's just random language change. Grammatical 'gender' in French or any other language I know doesn't really have a lot to do with sexual gender, it's just an accident that it's called that. In Danish the 'genders' are called "common" and "neuter"; in many African languages there are a good handful of 'genders'.
In German (which has three), Mädchen (girl) is neuter 'gender' - not because people think of girls as asexual, but simply because the "-chen" (little) suffix is always neuter gender. It's the same thing in French, that whether a word is "masculine" or "feminine" is mostly to do with the form of the word: as one example, if it ends in "-eur" then it's usually masculine. (There are exceptions of course: one of the words on the feminine list ended in "-eur", no wonder even the native speakers got confused.)
It seems most likely to me that all that's going on is that it's hard for native speakers - as for second-language learners - to memorise the 'gender' of every single noun they ever use. So in these cases which are not uncommon enough to have been regularised long ago, and just uncommon enough to not be on their lips ever hour, the native speakers aren't quite sure, or have forgotten, or are mistaken, which it should be. (Quick: "dived" or "dove"? "dreamed" or "dreamt"? "kneeled" or "knelt"? The only real difference is that we call these forms "weak" and "strong" forms instead of "masculine" and "feminine": ie the difference is in the nomenclature linguists and grammar teachers use, not in the language people speak.)
Ah yes but! :) There were three times as many teenagers as adults so you'd expect there to be less agreement amongst them, and it was a tiny sample anyway. There were some pretty weird words - like asking the past tense of strive - how much agreement would there be on that? Some of the words are known "difficult" words that don't follow rules. Some of the words are ones that are changing gender eg primeur and oasis, the latter because there is a drink called Oasis. There are some very interesting discussions here and here.
One commenter made the interesting point that the two words that teenagers were more correct than the adults were "victim" and "target".
Now what will be an interesting paper, is the one coming out next month which discusses the feminisation of occupational names eg Un pompier is a firefighter. Should a female firefighter be une pompière? In general French speaking people, and I believe it's true for other gendered languages, don't consider nouns designated masculine or feminine as having those properties.
and my comment never came through :(
[It just got chucked into moderation, again because of the links. I've pulled it out though, A. --fl]
[I'm going to respond to everyone as a fellow-commenter here. Sorry if anyone's leg feels pulled. Even I recognize that most native speakers of gendered languages don't pay attention to the actual *gender* of their cases -- as Larus says, "noun classes" would be a better, well, *translation* into English.
That said it's *still* has always been one of the big obstacles, both procedural (more bulk memorization) and conceptual. Even if I didn't find the whole idea insulting there's the low-level *cognitive* effort of trying to ignore my natural tendency to try to organize them into a logical structure. And then there's the *philosophical* effort of trying to suppress incredulity that the etymology for each word really, truely has no gendered signficance.
And really, after listening to all that, and trying to believe it, there's A's point about revisiting the cases for words like "firefighter." If all that gender-flapping really was just irrelevant, quirk-of-history, nobody-pays-attention noun-cases there would be no reason to revisit. But in fact they *are* significant, as significant as, I expect, the word revisions we're undertaking in English as in moving from "fireman" to "firefighter."
Anyway, one of these days I really *would* like to learn other languages (Greek, Latin, and Hebrew would be nice, Chinese and Arabic too, Portugese so I could visit Brazil, and contemporary European languages like Basque, Czech, Dutch, and then useful-for-local-conversation languages like Kurdish, Hawaiian, Ethiopean Amharic, Urdu, Vietnamese, Ukranian... quite a few, actually.) And when I do then yes, I'll suck up my pride (and excess brain cycles) remembering that the/she cup went/she into/he the/his dishwasher so that in *other* languages if not my own I won't be mistaken for a country bumpkin from southern Appalachia. :-)
Sadly my reCaptcha says "use notices."
--fl]
Hey, I wasn't saying that grammatical gender and biological sex (or other real-world differences) have *nothing at all* to do with each other. That would be dumb. They have so much to do with each other that, at least in some languages, speakers will occasionally break or change the rules of the grammar rather than put a word in the "wrong" gender.
(A real example, from Swedish, would be when the word 'child' is of the "nonhuman" gender, but speakers will tend to put adjectives that go together with it into the "human" gender. Another example, this time from Spanish, is when the word 'lizard' is masculine, but it can be turned into a feminine one to say 'female lizard'.)
So I could see how 'victim' might start to change genders according to if we are talking about a man or a woman.
But this sort of things mainly just happens when we are talking about human beings, or other things that actually do have gender/sex. If you come up with convincing evidence that social gender roles actually affect the gender of the word for "harmonica", well, I'll eat my hat. :)
Oh, and. I wish there was a way to put this that doesn't sound besserwissery, but *gender* and *case* are different things. *Case* has nothing to do with this.
[I totally admit that I'm miserable enough a grammarian that I wouldn't have known that grammatical gender and grammatical case might be different. Ouch! That said, if you can come up with convincing evidence that a harmonica should have any gender at all I'll eat your hat for you. :-) And either way, after that I'd invite you out for coffee and a talk. Thanks, Larus. --fl]
I love Appalachia :-). My favorite part, blooming rhododendron. It is one of the most beautiful places in the whole world. I like the way people there are friendly when they look at me and say, "You're not from here, are you?"
[Oh yeah some of the "balds" back there, the mountains topped not with hardwoods or pines but rhodies are just gorgeous. And the Smoky Mountain National Park area has the widest set of ecological niches in... if not the world then certainly the continent so there's just an astonishing variety of wildlife. There are all sorts of great cultural, commerce, transportation, publishing, and educational facilities near where I grew up as well... but also a tendency to sound like Gomer Pyle (who's fictional home town wasn't that far from where my grandparents lived at all, at all.) Thanks, Mag. --fl]
"one of these days I really *would* like to learn other languages "
I'll teach you French, no problem, private lessons. Probably not the best way for you to learn French, but I've no doubt at all I'll learn a lot of Appalachian American. Not ever a country bumpkin, not ever :)
[Actually since I'd want a total-immersion approach beginning in specific, narrow domain I'd be delighted to take you up on that, A. Ordinarily I think of domains like "in a kitchen" or "pertaining to computers or municipal government" because those are the sorts of things that get my attention while giving me a less-than-universal vocabulary to have to master first. But if there was some other domain we wanted to start out with... :-) --fl]
You're reading Language Log! I'm happy.
I think you're more right than a lot of people are giving you credit for. There's empirical evidence that the grammatical gender of nouns in a person's native language affects the perceived social gender of objects, even when the person isn't speaking their native language. (See Lera Boroditsky's paper. I'm still skeptical about the suggestion that etymology affects perception, but I'm open to changing my mind if somebody presents me with data.
Your "French people don't care about social gender" hypothesis seems too optimistic and too at odds with Occam's razor to be true, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if somebody proved me wrong. I think there is a gender-neutral French movement, much like the gender-neutral English movement, but I don't think its proposals are as sweeping as to entail the total elimination of grammatical gender.
[Entirely possible it's optimistic, of course, P. And I sort of hope I left that open. But I listed other possibilites and sort of forgot to leave out that it could just be the sort of slacker/mumbling approach to language a lot of American teenagers use before settling down in their 20's or 30's. (In other words they may *know* perfectly well whereof they speak and just aren't choosing to *use* it yet.) --fl]