Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

Languages that treat inanimate objects as “he” or “she” force their speakers to talk about such objects with the same grammatical forms that are applied to men and women. This habit of he-ing and she-ing objects means that an association between an inanimate noun and one of the sexes is shoved down the speakers’ ears whenever they hear the name of this object, and the same association is pushed up their throats whenever they have occasion to mention his or her name themselves. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold and the masculine or feminine association has been established, it is very difficult to shake it off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but I actually feel “she” is too soft. She stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.

As a basis for serious investigation, however, my professed feelings toward beds hardly constitute reliable evidence. It is not just the anecdotal nature of this information that is the problem, but the fact that I have not provided any proof that the “she” feeling is anything more than tongue-deep-a mere grammatical habit. The automatic association between an inanimate noun and a gendered pronoun does not, in itself, show that the grammatical gender has exercised any deeper effect on the speakers’ thoughts. It does not show, in particular, whether speakers of Hebrew or Spanish, which treat beds as feminine, really associate with beds any womanly properties.

Over the last century, various experiments have been conducted with the aim of testing precisely this question: Can the grammatical gender of inanimate objects influence speakers’ associations? Probably the first such experiment was conducted at the Moscow Psychological Institute in prerevolutionary Russia. In 1915, fifty people were asked to imagine each day of the week as a particular person, then to describe the person they had pictured for each day. It turned out that all participants envisaged Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday as men but Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday as women. Why should this be so? When asked to explain their choice, many of them could not give a satisfactory answer. But the researchers concluded that the answer could not be unrelated to the fact that the names for Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday have a masculine gender in Russian, whereas Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday are feminine.

In the 1990s, the psychologist Toshi Konishi conducted an experiment comparing the gender associations of speakers of German and of Spanish. There are quite a few inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. The German air is a she ( die Luft ) but el aire is he in Spanish; die Brücke (bridge) is also feminine in German but el puente is masculine; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world, and love. On the other hand, der Apfel is masculine for Germans but la manzana is feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain, and garbage. Konishi presented a list of such nouns with conflicting genders to German and to Spanish speakers and asked the participants for their opinions on the properties of those nouns: whether they were weak or strong, little or big, and so on. On average, the nouns that are masculine in German but feminine in Spanish (chairs and keys, for example) got higher marks for strength from the Germans, whereas bridges and clocks, which are masculine in Spanish but feminine in German, were judged stronger on average by the Spanish speakers.

The simple conclusion from such an experiment would be that bridges do have more manly connotations for Spanish speakers than for German speakers. However, one possible objection to this inference is that it may not be the bridge itself that carries such connotations-it may only have been hearing the name together with the masculine article el or un . In this interpretation, when Spanish and German speakers simply look at a bridge, their associations may not be affected at all, and it may be only in the moment of speech, only through the act of saying or hearing the gender marker itself, that a fleeting association with manliness or womanliness is created in the speaker’s mind.

Is it possible, therefore, to get round the problem and check whether womanly or manly associations for inanimate nouns are present even when the gender markers in the relevant language are not explicitly mentioned? The psychologists Lera Boroditsky and Lauren Schmidt tried to do this by repeating a similar experiment with Spanish and German speakers, but this time communicating with the participants in English rather than in their respective mother tongue. Although the experiment was conducted in a language that treats inanimate objects uniformly as “it,” the Spanish and German speakers still showed marked differences in the attributes they chose for the relevant objects. German speakers tended to describe bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender; Spanish speakers as big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, towering.

A more radical way of bypassing the problem was designed by the psychologist Maria Sera and her colleagues, who compared the reactions of French and Spanish speakers but used pictures of objects instead of words. As two closely related languages, French and Spanish mostly agree on gender, but there are still sufficiently many nouns that diverge: the fork, for instance, is la fourchette in French but el tenedor in Spanish, and so are cars ( la voiture, el carro ) and bananas ( la banana, el plátano ); on the other hand, French beds are masculine ( le lit ) but Spanish ones are feminine ( la cama ), and the same goes for clouds ( le nuage, la nube ) and butterflies ( le papillon, la mariposa ). The participants in this experiment were asked to help in the preparation of a movie in which some everyday objects come to life. Their task was to choose the appropriate voice for each object in the movie. They were shown a series of pictures, and for each one they were asked to choose between a man’s voice and a woman’s voice. Although the names of the objects were never mentioned, when French speakers saw the picture of a fork, most of them wanted her to speak in a woman’s voice, whereas the Spanish speakers tended to choose a male voice for him instead. With the picture of the bed, the situation was reversed.

The experiments described above are certainly suggestive. They seem to show that the grammatical gender of an inanimate object affects the properties that speakers associate with this object. Or at least what the experiments demonstrate is that the grammatical gender affects the responses when speakers are actively requested to indulge their imaginations and come up with associations for such an object. But this last point is in fact a serious weakness. All the experiments described so far suffer from one underlying problem, namely that they forced the participants to exercise their imaginations. A skeptic could argue with some justification that the only thing the experiments proved was that grammatical genders affect associations when the participants are coerced unnaturally to dream up properties for various inanimate objects. In the worst case, one could parody what might be going on in a participant’s mind as something like: “Here I am being asked all sorts of ridiculous questions. Now they want me to think up properties for a bridge-goodness me, what’s next? Well, I’d better come up with something, otherwise they’ll never let me go home. So I’ll say X.” Under such circumstances, the first property that comes to a Spanish speaker’s mind is indeed likely to be more manlike than womanlike. In other words, if you force Spanish speakers to be on-the-spot poets, and extract properties of bridges out of them, the gender system will indeed affect their choice of properties. But how can we tell whether the masculine gender has any influence on speakers’ spontaneous conceptions of bridges, even outside such exercises in poetry on demand?