Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Language changes as society changes, it has to in order to reflect the ideas that people want to express. One aspect that has me quite curious is the role of gender in language. You would have to be living in the Himalayas without internet access not to be aware of the push toward accepting those in the non-standard gender or sexual orientations as perfectly normal human beings. Although it has nothing to do with language, I’m all for accepting people as human beings.

What I do wonder about is the effect that actually erasing gender bias from language would have. I studied French. Six years of French. I have no idea why, it isn’t like I thought there would suddenly be a giant wave of French settlers in the middle of Oklahoma. My only excuse is that I loved the bizarre beauty of the language.

English does not come with gender. I’m not saying there isn’t gender bias in the language itself, just that our nouns are generally neuter, they don’t have a feminine or masculine ‘flavor’ to them in most instances. It is true that ships and cities are often referred to as ‘she’, and we live on mother earth, but your table, dog, and kitchen are just words.

French, like a lot of other languages, uses articles before pretty much every noun. So the dog in French is le chien, while the kitchen is la cuisine. Le denotes a masculine noun, and la is feminine. Since every object has an intrinsic gender, I wonder if the language will adapt to reflect the increasing inclusiveness of society. I know that any true Frenchperson would wash my mouth out with masculine soap and send me straight to my masculine bed without any masculine wine for even suggesting that their feminine language might change, but I think they may have to.

Generally speaking, the linguistic genders of words are divided by historical gender roles, and whether the word is active or passive. For example, traditionally role oriented words like kitchen are feminine, while office is masculine. A passive object, like a table, is more likely to be feminine than an active object, like a knife. Of course, there are exceptions, but hopefully you get the idea.

Even in English, where we thankfully did away with deciding whether every bloody item was masculine or feminine, we run into some awkward situations. In writing a short story regarding reincarnation, does my character who ends one life male, and starts another as a female, use the pronoun he or she? What about someone that is undergoing the transgender process? In their minds, they’ve always been one gender, but to the outside world they appeared another, and changed it, so which is proper to use when? Then there are those that are truly gender neutral, to whom neither masculine nor feminine properly applies, yet the only neutral pronoun our language possesses is ‘it’, which should not be applied to a human being.

Eventually, I think we will see a true neuter general usage creep into the language. It was attempted in the early 70’s when words like ‘waitron’ were trotted out to try to promote equality of the sexes. I’m not sure that particular attempt was very successful, but the idea is sound. We need words to express exact meanings. If the world changes, we invent new words to keep up with those changes. After all, people living in ancient Egypt had no words for quarks, computers, or antibiotics, simply because they didn’t need those words. Societal changes operate on the same principle, where a need to speak clearly evolves, the language will change to fit the need.

Until then, I’ll just have to struggle with appropriate pronoun use.

Cheers,

Michelle