3 People, grammar, and -of course- gender

Grammar is created by humans to explain language. Language is not a mere system of signs, but also a social phenomenon and a tool we use to negotiate our place in the world as subjects in the interaction with others.^[1] And because humans live in organized societies, language is also political. This is why talking about language implies talking about society too. So where does “grammatical gender” comes from?

If we try to force it, we could find folk explanations about an assumed relationship between grammatical gender and gender. I will illustrate this point with one specific example: “carro” (car) is masculine in Spanish, but feminine in Italian (“màcchina”) and Romanian (“mașină”); once a Romanian speaker told me that “in Romanian the word for car is feminine because the function of a car is accompanying men.” Can you imagine? I was shocked about this “logic”, as cars are for everyone. Now, those folk explanations make evident that there’s no clear separation between gender and sex in the popular imagination, and in ancient Rome, they actually took it seriously.

According to Ernesto Cuba^[2], the first discussion on grammar and gender in ancient Rome dates from 43 b.C., and grammarians used a lot of energy trying to force an explanation of why grammar and biological sex were related. With time, the explanation from linguistics changed into the idea of the arbitrariness of language, so nowadays language professionals -happily- would not make the assumptions of ancient Rome. However, history marks us and we still find speakers who try to find relationships between the gender of an object and the binary ideas about sex.

Something really important to bring to the reader’s attention at this point is that grammatical gender per se does not mean that a culture is more patriarchal than others whose languages do not have this feature. In the different Western-colonized and European cultures we find the patriarchy accumulated in the language in different ways; for example, the androcentric idea of “man” representing the entire humanity, putting men always first on a list, or referring to women in their relation to men.

However, in gendered languages the folk explanations and the representations allow humans to create narratives where nature and objects are depicted as male or female by following the binary ideas that many societies have about them. In other words, people create representations around language that make evident their ideologies. And those ideologies can also become the norm because grammatical rules are created by those who are in power. For example, according to conservative grammar rules, in Spanish, you use the masculine to talk about a group even when there is not a man, but a being in the group that goes with masculine; in other words, if you have a group of fifty women and a (male) dog and you want to say that they were excited, you have to use masculine. Such is the power given to grammatical gender by the rules.

And again what is patriarchal is the explanations about language, and the uses of language, because patriarchy is in the ideas first, and it is then translated into assumed norms. For example, even in non-gendered languages like English, it is common to find males mentioned before women or women whose names are erased to refer to them only as “someone’s wife.”

As we said earlier, the “grammatical gender” of words such as “carro” and “casa” is relatively arbitrary, but human representations of language are not arbitrary. Yadira Calvo^[3] quotes the dictionary entry for the letter “A” by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) in their first dictionary in 1739 (translation below):

“En el orden es la primera, porque es la que la naturaleza enseña al hombre desde el punto de nacer para denotar el llanto, que es la primera señal que da de haber nacido y aunque también la pronuncia la hembra, no es con la claridad que el varón, y su sonido, como lo acredita la experiencia, tira más a la E que a la A, en que parecen dar a entender que entran en el mundo como lamentándose de sus primeros padres Adán y Eva”

“In order [the A] goes first, because it is what nature teaches man since he is born to denote crying, that is the first signal of having being born, and also it is pronounced by the female, but not with the same clearness as the male, and her sound, as experience proofs, is closer to E than to A, in which they seem to communicate that they are entering the world lamenting their first parents Adan and Eva” (translation is mine)

We have two options: babies cried differently in the past or this is way too much of a bias! Those were people creating rules about language (as we will see in the next section), so they pretty much have the power to say whatever they want about language.

And there are other reasons why things going on around language are not so arbitrary. One is that grammatical gender has been tailored according to what societies allowed people to do. For example, “police” in Spanish is “policía”; in the past, if you said “el policía” (masculine) you would be referring to the officer, but if you said, “la policía” (feminine) you would have been referring to the office (the place). Nowadays “la policía” would mean both the place and a female officer.

So grammatical gender, when it comes to humans is not so arbitrary. When we are using grammar to index people, it is susceptible to intervention, and this is exactly what people have been doing in Spanish for quite a while! In the next section, we will learn about it.

Last updated on June 19, 2023