2 What gender do we embed?

Well, it is not gender in the social way you might think of it in English. We have the so-called grammatical gender and this is the one we embed in language. Even though -on the other hand- it is also true that we index the social gender of a person. Here I will focus on explaining the grammatical gender and, only after that, we will move to the difficulty of grammatical gender vs gender when we index people.

Classifying the world

Let’s start by saying that grammatical gender is a way of classifying objects, in this regard, it has nothing to do with people’s social identity, as other languages have other ways of classifying the world. In fact, it will be better if we introduce this idea of a “system of classification” with a different language where gender is not at stake in the classification.

When I say that languages help us to identify how we categorize the world, I am not talking about the category of a word: I am NOT talking about verbs, adjectives, nouns… Here we talk about ideas of the world that we include in the language: we use segments of the words to show that one object belongs to a category. And those categories follow different logic according to the culture and the story of the communities.

I want to walk away from the discussion on gender and will use an example from Bribri, which is an indigenous language spoken in Costa Rica that has no grammatical gender. In Bribri, when you count objects, you have to classify the object within a category. The most common are: human, rounded, flat, or long. Those categories are embedded by only adding a small fragment (a letter or syllable) at the end of the words:

This means that you need an understanding of how objects are perceived. For those of us who are not Bribri speakers, the category ‘human’ sounds logical, but it is hard to define the rest. For example, it is not hard for me to think of certain objects that are rounded but also flat, how should I classify them?

In Spanish, our classification system is the grammatical gender and, just as it happens with Bribri, classifying is confusing for language learners because the grammatical gender is arbitrary. Now let’s talk about Spanish and how grammatical gender is used!

Grammatical gender in use in Spanish

Spanish grammatical gender has two categories labeled “masculine” and “feminine”. We find these categories all across the language in any object, for example, “house” and “car” have no reason to be masculine or feminine, but we categorize them:

casa (house) is a feminine word — they usually end with -a (not always)

carro (car) is a masculine word  — they usually end with -o (not always)

To put it in a simple introductory way, the gender of the word will affect all we say about it or all the text around it. For example, if I want to talk about how expensive these objects are, the adjective “expensive” (caro, cara) will have grammatical gender in Spanish and if you use an article, the article (la, el) will have grammatical gender too. In other words, the article and the adjective have to follow the grammatical gender of the word; here you can see in the blank the grammatically gendered words:

La casa es cara. (expensive in femenine)

El carro es caro. (expensive in masculine)

Despite people might think of “masculine” and “feminine” in relation to sex, the reality is that grammatical gender in non-sexed beings/objects is arbitrary. As you can see, the gender of “casa” and “carro” has no relationship with any specific characteristic of the object, its use, or anything in the world. To put it in a different way, there’s no sex-related reason behind the use of grammatical gender in these substantives.

In fact, as a system of classification, grammatical gender has other functions. It can embed information such as size, person-place, etc. For example… do you like mangoes? Well, in places like Costa Rica, we differentiate between “la manga” (feminine) and “el mango” (masculine), where the feminine form means that it is bigger. In other words, what we are embedding in the word is actually information about the size!

The grammatical gender only has a relationship to sex when we are talking about sexed animals, including humans, or if we are constructing a fictional character within a narrative. Again, “Car” and “house” have no sex, but humans and other animals do. So, when it comes to sexed animals, grammar is used to index their sex. And here, when we talk about humans, the subject is more complex than the binary male-female because the way in which gender and sex operate in society is much more complex. Nonetheless, I want to highlight that we have a Western society that thought about gender and sex binarily until very recently. Thus, it makes sense that people created narratives and folk explanations about the “natural” relationship between grammatical gender and social gender.

Said all this, where does the idea of “grammatical gender” comes from?

Last updated on June 19, 2023