The same thing happened to a friend of my dad. A long time ago, the friend was a British diplomat living somewhere like Singapore and he made friends with the two Japanese sisters in the next apartment. They used to have tea and chat and he helped them practice their English. Being good with languages he soon picked up a lot of Japanese from them. One day he got invited to an event at the Japanese Embassy and was excited to be able to show off his secret language skills. However, any Japanese man he spoke to would react strangely and it looked like they were trying hard not to laugh. He eventually got someone to explain that he was using “women’s words”, and the effect of a dignified English gentleman in a tuxedo talking like that was hilarious to them.
This is a running joke among Japanese language learners, but less of an actual problem than you'd think. The really feminine words (atashi, kashira, ending sentences with wa etc) are trivially avoided, so you end up with neutral/excessively polite/gaijinkusai but not particularly feminine language.
For what it's worth, few foreigners master Japanese to the level where they could convincingly sound like a tough male/gangster, but unless you actually are in the Yakuza, this ability is not particularly useful. Sonai yuun yattara ippen washi no chinpo shabutte miruka?
> This is a running joke among Japanese language learners, but less of an actual problem than you'd think.
I have gotten some comments about my Chinese being somewhat feminine. I don't speak, so this is all based on text messaging. And Chinese doesn't have overt gender-of-speaker markers, so the issue persists even if you avoid those.
I particularly remember one person commenting that making the agreement / I'm-listening noise in two syllables, 嗯嗯, was "cute" where a man should have just said 嗯. Apparently, this is the kind of thing that will get you.
For what it's worth, in my face-to-face interactions with Chinese men, I got a lot more criticism for the fact that all of the acquaintances I ever mentioned were female than for my choice of words in the rare case where I spoke in Chinese. But again, speaking Chinese is mostly restricted to text messages for me.
> 嗯嗯, was "cute" where a man should have just said 嗯. Apparently, this is the kind of thing that will get you.
Chinese people that I have talked to in Shanghai laughed at me when I said I liked using stickers (表情包)/emoji on WeChat. Apparently, guys are hardly meant to use them and that stickers/emoji are for girls.
Personally, I didn't take heed of their advice nor cared as everybody has their own way of communicating. I use 嗯嗯 stickers whenever I feel like it instead of 嗯. I use 哦 sometimes instead of 嗯 to annoy people and act like I am paying attention.
As an Asian guy, most of my friends/acquaintances in China are female. I have no issues talking to Chinese guys but tend to get on well with females there I guess.
However, back in London where I grew up, almost all of my friends are male. Confused? So am I.. lol.
I disagree. Yes, it's trivial to avoid saying Atashi and ending sentence in wa, but feminine language differences are a lot more pervasive than that. There's a ton of subtle stuff, and you end up sounding strange if you aren't really careful. To just give one example, there are a ton of places you can choose to throw in an o- or not, just like in English, you can choose to say "the" or not. As in English, it's about pattern matching and getting used to the subtle frequencies for this stuff. Just like French people sound silly when they use "the" in the wrong places, a man sounds silly when using o- in the wrong places.
> To just give one example, there are a ton of places you can choose to throw in an o- or not, just like in English, you can choose to say "the" or not.
Definiteness marking is certainly an area where speakers of languages that don't do that get confused. But I'm not comfortable saying that there are a ton of places in English where you can choose to say "the" or not. In most cases, there's only one correct choice.
Going back over the nouns in my previous paragraph: (marking area[0] speakers[1] languages[2] I ton[0] places English you cases choice[1] [there])
[0] rival article already marked
[1] "the" permissible; presence and absence are both fine
I think GP was talking about honorific/humble o not the object marker o, and chose a poor metaphor. Because honorific/humble o is often a signal for feminine language... there was a trending tiktok video about prefixing "toilet" with "o" for example.
I think that exists in most languages, including English! I also don't think it's too much of a problem, since once you have exposure to a broader spectrum of people you start to pick up what is masculine / feminine speech and how different social classes talk.
This is one of ways I can tell whether email was written by the native English speaker. Articles are missing or in wrong place.
The plurals is other dead giveaway. Apparently articles and plurals are very difficult in English, but to me--a native English speaker--they are the most natural thing in the world.
Of course I'm complete shit at the Latin-based languages because I can never get the masculine/feminine words right.
It happens in some of the plains tribal languages. One of my female bosses at a grant program learned to speak her native language from her uncles. Her female relatives tease her about speaking like a man.
Yes. The difference between the dialects of Lakota, Nakota & Dakota is that the L's in Lakota are replaced by N's and D's in their respective dialects.
Good point - my wife is hispanic and I've learned Spanish mostly from her. She's quick to correct me when I use a phrase that she uses all the time that men shouldn't (like "que feito", for example).
This is typical Flanders-tongue but are interesting. The goal is not sounding femenine, is sounding childish. Something that can be useful
Porfa is used only when the context is casual. Porfi is extra-casual and childish but men can use it perfectly in the correct context. An example
> Por favor (Please) let me eat cake.
Not.
> Porfa (pleaaase, more pleading and casual) ...
No way, is for later.
> Porfiiii... (please,please,please... big eyed Cat of Shrek mode)
Well, okay...
> (bingo!)
In Spain using a childish tone by men is perfectly acceptable as long as you turn to the normal mode fast and you have a purpose.
Can be used to express a very close relationship with your audience. As a cute effect.
And much more important, can be used as comic relief.
When mimicking a child you reduce your level of perceived menace to other. Is like saying "Just joking, hehe", therefore you are triggering a calming effect in your public. Holi is the worst offender, but a big tall man talking to an afraid children could use it without any problem to express "I don't want to hurt you". Saying directly "I don't want to hurt you" could sound threatening instead (There is an implicit "I don't want... but I could")
An adult man will not need to calm other adult stranger normally, so in this context can do more harm than good.
Never use it all the time, and never in business or formal context because you simply lose leverage.
This is very common in Japan, it is honestly very cringe-inducing to see Western males coming off this way, it seems needy and submissive more than anything.
English actually has different languages for 12 year olds and adults. Vocabulary like “cringe” is fine for kids, but makes you come off as judgmental and unpleasant when used in a more formal context.
The only way that will happen is if adults start using it. Next time you meet a 12 year old who says something is "cringe", tell them they are "cringe" for using the word "cringe".
I wonder if this will continue to be a generational thing, I still have a smattering of eighties Valley-speak because that was pretty popular in my teen years. Maybe people who are in their early teens now will be as likely to call something they don't like "cringe" in their fifties as I am to call something "bogus".
The funny thing is, Japanese women don't really come off that way, it's just how they talk and they are quite adept at achieving their goals with their "feminine" language. One gets the impression that many of the Western men who learn Japanese from their wives and girlfriends are actually trying to emulate this ability to manipulate their world through softer / more social language and achieve similar levels of success, but it doesn't really work for them and seems sociopathic instead. Hence, the cringe.
Interesting. Would "simping" be a better term than sociopathic? Obviously that's not necessarily what's going on, but Japanese is already so contextual, I imagine it's difficult to separate/rationalize how someone speaks the way they do from the why.
The persistence of this phenomenon has puzzled me for decades. From the 1980s, I have asked Japanese women who are married to foreigners, "Since you care about how your husband is perceived in Japanese society, why don't you correct him away from overtly female speech habits?" The usual reaction is to be simply dumbfounded at the question. I've never talked to a Japanese woman who reacted like, "Hey, that's a good idea."
I speak “female“ Kansai dialect because that's what I hear all the time from my wife. When I speak to other Japanese people they find it pretty hilarious.
I'm learning Japanese (very slowly and more of a hobby) and being a caricature of a "gaijin who speaks like a woman" has always been a fear of mine haha.
Fun fact, katakana (more sharp and right angled lines) used to be for men and hiragana for women (more round and swift).
I feel this in my own life, as an European grown up mostly around my mother, sister, and younger female cousins. My father lived abroad for long periods of time.
Women nowadays keep assuming I'm gay due to my mannerisms.
https://notalwaysright.com/a-gender-fluid-household/157967/ . Short version: 11 year old living only with women picked up practices about how to wear at towel, what to shave, wearing mascara, etc. that his mother's boyfriend both supports and gently points out they are typically gendered.
How did the mom not realize that her kid was shaving his legs and wearing mascara? I guess it would be one thing if the kid was doing it with intention, but he clearly wasn't. How did she never talk to her son about that?
Don't forget bias error. The linked-to site gets contributions from around the world. There's 45 million mothers in the US, so source population of about 100 million mothers. If 0.1% of families have no other male presence that's 100K families. If 0.01% of these mothers don't notice [1], that's still 10 families.
And it's the unusual which make it to sites like these. ("When dog bites man, it's not news. But when man bites dog, now that is news!")
[1] Or it could be the mother didn't know how to bring it up, or thought she was being supportive of her son's choices.
I feel like if the boy went to school with male students the other boys would make fun of him until he conformed to the standard behavior, or until he decided he didn't care if people made fun of him.
... yes. Which is probably why the text says "She laughs and apologizes after [Stepdad] tells her I am lucky I've never showered at school or I'd be a laughing stock" and "I'm SO GLAD he was around before I started high school; I can't imagine that would have been a pleasant experience doing things the way I'd always done them."
Could other 11 year olds spot a boy using mascara, a differing from one with thick eyelashes?
Or tell that someone is shaving his legs when there isn't yet even peach fuzz on his chin?
I couldn't, but I'm pretty oblivious to such things.
Well, there's a growing trend against bullying. Personally, bullying toughened me up, and it affected me in ways that I am glad for. Of course it could have gone wrong, too.
eh, i think i am largely glad the whole bullying + male chauvinism thing is slowly dying out.
i think the next step is recognizing that this is a problem that needs to be confronted for both men and women. "toxic masculinity" among men is frequently nowadays talked about and criticized, but i think women are given a bit too much of a pass in holding pretty shitty gendered/trad expectations of men.
I couldn't use chapstick in elementary school because of the relentless bullying it inevitably triggered. Not just toward me, but any male that dared to hydrate his lips. That sort of reaction made me super averse toward any sort of preening-type of behavior, lest I be perceived as feminine.
Even now, I'm more comfortable if I look at least a little unkempt, as if I work outside with my hands or something. I consciously know it's dumb, but my wife expresses preferences for that unkemptness in me as well.
I wonder why this comment is getting down-voted. I am talking about my own experience, and I also acknowledge that it could have gone wrong. What exactly is down-vote worthy here?
"Could have gone wrong" is a mild phrase which doesn't reflect the reasons why there is trend against bullying.
An amputee might find strength and toughness in learning to adapt to being without an arm. That doesn't mean we go around encouraging people to cut off their arms. I suspect most amputees would rather not have to have that experience in the first place.
> Many beliefs about school bullying are not supported by current research. These are among the most common myths that even some teachers have been known to endorse: ...
> Being a victim builds character.
> Another misconception is that bullying is a normal part of the childhood and adolescence experience, and that surviving peer harassment builds character. In contrast to this view, research findings clearly show that being bullied increases the vulnerabilities of bullied children. For example, we know that children who are passive and socially withdrawn are at a heightened risk of getting bullied and these children become even more withdrawn after incidents of harassment (Schwartz, Dodge, & Coie, 1993).
How many other people suffered, in being part of the same bullying environment from which you drew your character?
I can't speak for those who downvoted you, but the implication of your post (whether intentional or not) is someone might be doing someone a favor by bullying them. (You are "glad" that it happened.) I rolled my eyes at the image of a person punching people in the face and then lecturing them on how they did them a favor.
Sure. But this story is clearly labeled "Australia", and Pakistan and Afghanistan have their own gender-based customs. So your point is .... that gender practices are not universal?
I mean, growing up in the US I heard about how French women didn't shave their armpits. As an Italian example, Sophia Loren - https://fineartamerica.com/featured/sophia-loren-on-a-poster... . So it's not like these have been universal Western practices even in my lifetime.
Deaf Irish men and women who went to school in the mid 20th century would have learned different sign languages.
"The fact that the Catholic schools are segregated on the basis of gender led to the development of a gendered-generational variant of Irish Sign Language that is still evident (albeit to a lesser degree) today."
It's very typical for Signed Languages to have multiple centers usually the schools for Deaf. Swiss German Sign Language for example has five centers for Bern, Basel, Zürich, Luzern and St. Gallen. People say today that Swiss German Sign Language has five dialects and this usually wows people, even the Alemannic Swiss who themselves have many variants in their Alemannic dialect.
Ireland is special that they gender-segretated the Deaf children and the consequence is that women and men have different dialects.
While e.g. Nüshu (a secret women's only writing system) is a rather extreme example, Japanese with its various first-person pronouns and gendered patterns to verb conjugations is not that odd. Many languages are like that. Possibly all languages, to some degree. It's a continuum, probably, between slightly to moderately gendered with most languages.
English is definitely on that continuum, by the way. Any significant text (just a few paragraphs) has enough clues to predict a speaker or writer's gender with considerable confidence. This shows up most dramatically with statistical models (including deep learning) but trends with particular grammatical constructs and word choices were noted long ago.
This seems to be conflating grammatical gender - which includes differences in pronouns, adjectives, sometimes verbs, and pronunciation, but is still based on relatively minor variations in a common vocabulary - with full dialects, which can have very distinct vocabularies and may include words with unique meanings.
English is at the de-grammarised end of the spectrum. There are gendered clues in English, but they're (mostly) not baked into the grammar. The differences are more about specific idioms and expressions that one gender is more likely to use, and they're really a kind of variation on other subgroup slangs - like teen slang, other age-related indicators.
Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it's... just there. It doesn't do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns.
Fully distinct dialects/languages are incredibly rare and are often artificial and/or more likely to be created by a subculture than as a direct result of gender differences.
Example: English has Polari, which was entertainer/street slang and often used in gay subcultures. It also has Cockney, Estuary, Northern, Scottish, Urban, and others - all differentiated by culture.
I used Japanese, like the article did, as an example for this reason. Japanese has no grammatical gender like French. But Japanese is gendered. There are patterns in Japanese, where men and women use pronouns differently, and have slightly different patterns to which grammatical forms they use, and when. Women tend to use polite forms, in pronoun and noun choice as well as verb conjugation, more than men do. Small differences in sentence final particles, and so on. In practice the standard language becomes nearly gender-neutral in formal, polite contexts. Still, there's a real effect in Japanese, where men and women do speak and even write slightly differently. Male students of Japanese can even suffer a problem where they sound effeminate because they have modelled themselves on teachers who are mostly women.
I was just observing this general effect is probably true, to some degree, big or small, for most languages. It's probably a little more pronounced in Japanese than English. In neither case is it anywhere distinct enough to call it a separate dialect for men and women.
> Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions.
Grammatical gender like French or Arabic is pretty unusual, really. It's common in the Indo-European and Semitic languages, which are prominent by number of speakers, but grammatical gender is fairly rare when surveying the world's language families as a whole. It's completely absent from many of them. The whole Sino-Tibetan language family (including modern Chinese), for example. They get along fine with a single third person pronoun (in speech) and no grammatical gender.
Interesting fact is that very early Indo-European likely didn't have grammatical gender. The (extinct) Anatolian languages (Hittite, Luwian) split off before Indo-European really gelled, and they didn't have gender but instead a system of animate/inanimate.
In Persian (an Indo-European language), not only is there no grammatical gender, but also there are no gender pronouns [1]. You can write text that is technically gender-neutral.
Interestingly, I heard a podcast or read a book not long ago (I'd guess John McWhorter, but don't quote me on that) that touched on this, and the author attributed this simplification from the Indo-European norm of heavy grammatical gender to the fact that both Persian and English achieved their modern forms largely as languages learned by adults - the Vikings mixing with Saxons, the various subjects of the Persian Empire - and thus they tended to simplify endings.
It’s still possible to explicitly mention the gender. For example say “that woman” or “the man”. The reader also might get some clues from the context, for example, saying “my dad said…” will reveal some clues about the gender of the subject. It’s optional.
I don't see how is grammatical gender relevant to this. Czech has it, and both males and females speak it the same. Different suffixes are used to refer to yourself but nobody would think of that as "men/women language" as it's exactly what the others use when speaking about men/women.
This has shown up in the responses to my fan-fic. More than once I have been told I used suffixes wrong because I have someone of the wrong sex used -chan -kun to the other sex.
If you took any Indo-European language and created a new language completely contradicting it with respect to any aspect of the language, you'd get something pretty close to Turkish :-) I am really surprised you think Turkish is similar to any Indo-European language. Btw, the Altaic language family is also disputed. The most accepted theory is that Turkic languages are an isolated language family by themselves.
I am sure I had learned (long in the past) that they were in different families; but my little exposure to Turkish led me to believe (having forgotten what I had learned) that they were related; why? because the conjugations and tense modalities evoked to me an analogy to those of romance languages, and the declination cases and flexible word order evoked to me those of Easter European languages; while at the same time dismissing the greatest difference: it's agglutinative character.
That’s correct, grammar wise Turkish is closer to Japanese and Korean than to Indo-European languages, but there’s an incredible amount of French loanwords (partly because of Ataturk’s obsession with French).
French loanwords started came to language in first half of 19th century, during the attempts of reforms by Sultans and with the influence of people who had French education. I would argue most french loanwords were adapted earlier than 1920's where Ataturk had an influence on Turkish language. Roughly ~4% of Turkish words are French loanwords.
Turkish has little structural or grammatical resemblance to Indo-European languages from the perspective of its main features (extreme agglutination and vowel harmony).
(Edit: reduced absoluteness, because lack of grammatical gender feature can be found in some Indo-European languages)
> Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it's... just there. It doesn't do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns.
I can't speak for all Romance languages but my native Spanish: it's true that we have gendered nouns (most if not all of them, I think) but it has nothing to do with the speaker, so it's not a language for men or women. For example, a chair ("silla") is always female, regardless of whether it's me saying it (a male) or my mother. It's a bit like how ships in English are a "she" regardless of who's speaking, only more enforced and for all nouns.
An interesting Romance counter-example is "Obrigado" vs "Obrigada" ("thank you", in Portuguese). I'm not even remotely fluent, but if I recall correctly, the gender is dependent on the speaker, not the person being addressed.
I've heard of this example before, and this is speculative but I wonder if it's because the speaker is counter-intuitively also the object of the phrase.
The root "obrigad" sounds a lot like the English word "obligate". If this is more than just a coincidence, then a more direct translation is "I am obliged" rather than "thank you". Said this way it makes a lot of sense why the verb is determined by the speaker.
The difference between the "obrigado" in Portuguese example and the "me llamo" in Spanish example is that "obrigado" is probably an adjective while "llamo" is a verb. An equivalent Spanish example would be "estoy obligado" ("I am obligated" with male speaker) and "estoy obligada" ("I am obligated" with female speaker).
As an aside, I don't think Spanish has a word that's quite like "obliged". Maybe "endeudado", but that's just "in debt" and is not particularly about favors.
Well, practically all adjectives in Spanish/Portuguese/French/Italian change depending on the grammatical gender of the noun they refer to. And, of course, if the noun in question is "I" (as in your case), then they reveal the (physical) gender of the speaker because usually
grammatical gender of a person == physical gender of that person
But compared to the differences in, e.g., Japanese that some people here are discussing, this seems rather minor.
OK, but neither are examples of language being different based on the speaker, they are both based on gender of the object, whether is is contextually yourself, or another.
Oh, yes, but those aren't nouns. I didn't mean Spanish isn't gendered -- it obviously is -- but that gendered nouns aren't indicative of the gender of the speaker, so that particular observation was unrelated to the topic under discussion. Your example is indeed an example of gendered language depending on the speaker, and has similar examples in Spanish (e.g. "contento" / "contenta" for "happy").
I don't think you understood what you're responding to as it was not talking about grammatical gender, which is why it mentioned the use of statistical methods. The claim was that men and women do write in different dialects although they are less pronounced than in other languages.
> Japanese with its various first-person pronouns and gendered patterns to verb conjugations is not that odd
Japanese does have gendered first-person pronouns, though the textbook standard one "watashi" is neutral. In Japanese, pronouns in general (including fp) are used less than English; they are only used when there is ambiguity, names are often preferred to pronouns, and in casual speech it is even OK to refer to yourself by your name (like Jimmy from Seinfeld.)
In the textbook, Japanese doesn't really have gendered patterns to verb conjugations. Verbs are rather conjugated based on level of formality, for example "itte-ru", "itte-imasu", "itte-orimasu" all mean "I am going" in ascending degree of politeness. There are also impolite/brash-sounding forms "iku-zo", "ikou-ze", "ike", etc. which tend to be said more by men (or teenage boys) but women can use them too, it's just not "lady-like".
That said--it is fair to observe that in film for example samurai and geishas speak essentially two different sounding languages, more so than a knight versus a princess. Men are expected to be rugged and use "rugged" words; women are expected to be beautiful and use "beautiful" words. There are definitely words, speech, and tonal patterns which are more masculine and feminine, but in anime for example these differences are exaggerated far beyond real-world conversational norms.
I always thought the pronouns were fascinating, just because of the level of intentionality implied in picking one. It's like if in English I deliberately chose to say "I, a tough guy, did X" (which I gather is the approximate equivalent of saying "ore wa X"...).
An explanation that I find very fitting to Japanese is it’s a “topic prominent” language with topic-comment structure rather than being subject prominent like English is. The concept of topic explains frequent absence of explicit subjects better, I think.
> ...in anime for example these differences are exaggerated far beyond real-world conversational norms.
Yes, and not only in anime. The stereotyping of language by gender, occupation, social class, etc. is pervasive in Japanese popular culture. The linguist Satoshi Kinsui calls this practice yakuwarigo [1].
It also exists in translations into Japanese from English and other languages, with dialogue in novels being rendered into stereotyped forms, even though the original dialogue was not marked for gender and Japanese people often do not speak that way in real life, either. I worked as a Japanese-to-English translator for many years, and those gendered translations in the other direction always felt strange to me.
I’ve discussed this issue with Japanese translators several times over the years. Most of them said that they were uncomfortable about using those stereotyped forms but that their publishers and, they presumed, the readers expected it. Times are changing, though. Just last month, the Asahi Shimbun ran a series of articles [2, 3, 4; paywalled and in Japanese] about changing attitudes toward gender stereotyping in translations into Japanese.
In real language use, sociolinguistic differences often vary by the individual and the situation. I’ve known Japanese women who never—except maybe when being sarcastic—use the pronouns or sentence-ending forms that are typical of female characters in manga and anime. The faculty meetings at the university where I now teach are conducted in very formal Japanese, and I have never noticed anyone use an expression in those meetings that seemed typically masculine or feminine. Real-life professors don’t talk like professors in manga, either.
> Any significant text (just a few paragraphs) has enough clues to predict a speaker or writer's gender with considerable confidence.
Do you have any examples of this?
Not saying I don't believe you, but unless the text contains something very obvious (e.g. "my wife"), I often can't tell if the writer is a man or a woman.
It's much easier to tell in Italian, French or Spanish, for example, all languages where the gender of the speaker is baked into most sentences.
Some anecdotes I remember regarding American English: men pose fewer questions, are more likely to use double negative forms, and use the passive voice less. Many word choices are somewhat gendered as well. One reply gives the obvious example of "lovely" being much more commonly used by women, but many words are like that. Even a simple choice like which empty qualifier you use -- "drastically", "dramatically", "enormously", "badly", "awfully" -- can apparently tip the scales one way or the other. (I don't know which is supposedly which for those!) These are small differences individually, but summed up they apparently become considerable.
Even as a non-native English speaker I can tell you off the top of my head: "lovely" in the American culture is predominantly used by women (though in the British culture exceptions can be made more often). But I'm sure there are a lot of more subtle differences too.
British culture is very much not homogeneous in this regard. The use of words like lovely probably tells a British speaker more about the geographical origin of the speaker than their sex.
There is a site I'd used a while back for exactly this when I was trying to ensure that my writing (and speech) in some fiction was gendered in a particular manner - https://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze
Playing "guess why" is the fun part :) I'm sure there are other tools available now and I'd love to hear of them if people are aware of them!
I don't speak any Spanish or Italian, but I had French in school (it's been a while) and I presently cannot recall how the gender of the speaker is more obvious than in, say, English.
English kind of has traces of this in eg “I’m an actress/waitress/stewardess” (vs actor/waiter/steward) although gendered role-terms like those are less common and tend to get phased out in favor of gender-neutral ones (“server” replacing waiter/tress and “flight attendant” replacing steward/ess). And I wouldn’t consider it incorrect or out of place for a woman to say “I’m an actor”.
"Mon amie est enseignante. Durant l'été elle s'est engagée à se lever plus tôt pour la nouvelle année scolaire."
- "amie" is feminin of "ami"
- "enseignante" is feminin of "enseignant"
- "elle s'est engagée" is feminin of "il s'est engagé"
Edit: note that the concept of "gender" in indo-european languages is only vaguely related to the concept of "gender" as in human sexual expression. For example "la nouvelle année scolaire" ("the new school year"), "année" is considered feminin, so "nouvelle" has to be adapted to the feminin, instead of the masculin/neutral "nouveau". But that of course doesn't make any sense if you only consider "gender in languages" to be about male/female.
Yeah, a better example would be something describing their speaker. For example: "je suis américain" vs. "je suis américaine," (I'm American) the latter being the feminine form of "American."
I am not a French speaker by any means so feel free to correct my words.
I don't speak French, but I'm a native Spanish speaker and I have two observations:
First, it's true that Romance languages use gender in this manner. I was just pointing out that the specific example chosen didn't show this. The example has nothing to do with the gender of the speaker, but with the gender of the object under discussion; it's similar to you saying "she" or "her" when referring to a woman; it enables me to make no assumptions about your own gender.
Second:
> Anything the speaker would say about themselves would have to be gendered accordingly.
In Spanish there are careful ways to avoid making assertions about yourself in a gendered manner. They are a bit more roundabout, but can be done. My point is not that this is the most natural way of speaking, just pointing out that it's technically not true that you must always make gendered assertions about yourself.
Example:
Instead of saying "I'm very tired", "estoy muy cansado" (gendered male language) I can say "tiredness overcomes me", "el cansancio me invade", hiding my gender. Yes, it's a bit artificial but not so uncommon I have never read it. So in Spanish you can make assertions about yourself without betraying your gender. Don't know about French or other Romance languages, but it wouldn't surprise me to know you can employ similar tricks. It's probably harder in Spanish than in English to hold a conversation longer than a couple of sentences while hiding your gender; it will start sounding very unnatural, I grant you this.
I guess you could do it to certain extents, but it’s likely to be considered incorrect French, or just really weird. Now if you’re writing a song or a poem, it’s more common to see that kind of construct, as a way to play with rhythm and sounds, so it’s not entirely impossible.
Many adjectives in Spanish have gender, so for example:
I'm tired (male) -> estoy cansado
I'm tired (female) -> estoy cansada
In French it works the same way, although I'm not confident enough in French to give you an example without making horrible spelling mistakes. But the idea is the same.
Je suis tombé is passé composé. Je suis fatigué is présent de l'indicatif. Fatigué can both be an adjectif and a participe passé. The verb fatiguer uses the avoir auxiliary verb when using passé composé however: ils m'ont fatigué / la poutre a fatigué sous le poids.
The passé composé of "je suis fatigué(e)" [I am tired] would actually be "j'ai été fatigué(e)" [I was tired]. Translated word for word to Portuguese, this would be "Eu tive sido/estado cansado(cansada)".
In Italian some tenses are gendered. They are more or less the equivalent of english perfect tenses, like
"Io sono andato"/"Io sono andata" (I have been to)
"Io sarò andato"/"Io sarò andata" (I will have been to)
While you can certainly use statements like that to adjust your priors, be careful not to make absolute assumptions - in the US approximately 1% of people who have a wife are women.
There's a great, and almost impossible to translate, scene in the movie "Your name", where, after the female protagonist character finds herself in the body of the protagonist male characters, almost gets in trouble for using the wrong "I".
I imagine to some extent men and women choose different words because they express different ideas? That can still be a for societal reasons if you like but at a "level lower" than language.
This kind of question reminds me of "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him"
"We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age."
Is it just me, or are most of the results in that paper rather obvious and not very useful in general, outside of social media posts. In Facebook posts, it's not surprising that men talk more about computer games and sport, and swear more. Women using more emotion words and men more object words, is again fairly obvious.
If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as well.
> Women using more emotion words and men more object words, is again fairly obvious.
Is it? I think it's rather interesting. Though not really as much of a language dialect rather than a perspective shift, as if the men and women on average interpret the world differently.
> If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as well.
It should be a pretty easy test to do, for those with the trained classifier; I wonder why they haven't reported on doing it.
It seems like the differences in word choice are strongly driven by the topics people choose to talk about on Facebook. Besides obvious cases like "shopping" vs. "xbox" there's also more subtle things like
> we noticed ‘my wife’ and ‘my girlfriend’ emerged as strongly correlated in the male results, while simply ‘husband’ and ‘boyfriend’ were most predictive for females. Investigating the frequency data revealed that males did in fact precede such references to their opposite-sex partner with ‘my’ significantly more often than females. On the other hand, females were more likely to precede ‘husband’ or ‘boyfriend’ with ‘her’ or ‘amazing’ and a greater variety of words, which is why ‘my husband’ was not more predictive than ‘husband’ alone. Furthermore, this suggests the male preference for the possessive ‘my’ is at least partially due to a lack of talking about others' partners.
To disentangle the effect of topic choice from word choice, you'd probably need a controlled study with fixed writing prompts.
Is Turing's Imitation Game - in its original formulation to identify which of players A and B is the woman and the man - so easily solved? I don't think so.
It's clear that many factors contribute to one's choice of language.
My freshman year roommate spoke more "Southern" when on the phone to family than when talking to others in the dorm.
The language of a scientific monograph is quite different than the language of an HN comment, and being able to write in that style suggests an academic training.
So I'm not surprised that gender can also be a factor in word choice. Indeed, a friend of mine who reads romance novels claims a common difference between male and female authors is how they describe clothing.
If you want to describe all of those as different languages ... I've long given up trying to understand the differences between 'dialect' and 'language' (much less 'sociolect', 'ethnolect', 'stylistic register', etc) so go right ahead.
But I'm hesitant to believe that "Any significant text" predicts a specific author's gender "with considerable confidence."
I know of several cases where people tried and failed to guess an author's gender. Robert Silverberg, for example, found "something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing"; James Tiptree, Jr. was the male pseudonym of a female author. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr.)
> However, other gaps need to be addressed as well, including that no method of classifying age or gender—both of which are aspects of author profiling—that also considers the genre or nature of the analyzed text has been widely endorsed. Beyond that, to the best of our knowledge, no research has involved surveying or comparing the different approaches used in author profiling. In fact, current knowledge about the task is largely based on small-scale experiments conducted to find a reliable classification method with a near-zero error rate. In order to use forensic authorship profiling as admissible evidence in courts, the proposed methods must have about 100% accuracy. The average accuracy of good proposed methods are ranging from 70-85% [5]–[9]. However, the proposed methods still suffer from low accuracy.
That suggests that the "with considerable confidence" you refer to is on a population level, and not a per-person level. Rather like how, with considerable confidence, I can say that in general men are taller than women, even though many women are taller than many men.
> Is Turing's Imitation Game - in its original formulation to identify which of players A and B is the woman and the man - so easily solved? I don't think so.
The imitation game is adversarial (both players try to convince the interrogator that they are the woman, or the human). GP was talking about non-adversarial settings.
- How many people are trained to write using an adversarial style?
(Quoting the top Google hit for "write like a man" at https://www.timsquirrell.com/blog/2017/3/29/write-like-a-man... : """Teachers often make up for this by telling their female students, either explicitly or implicitly, to "write like a man". This means that they should write confidently, "objectively", not hedging their arguments, coming down boldly on one side of an issue, etc.""")
- Are all gender mis-identifications due to the authors using deliberate adversarial techniques?
They’ve missed at least one prominent example, namely the South American language Karajá [0]. Ribeiro’s grammar spends a whole chapter talking about the difference between female and male speech, which include:
• Men can drop k, often causing vowel fusion and modification
• Men drop d/n in the two words dõ ‘a’ and adõ ‘something’
• Various irregular vocabulary differences
For instance, female dɪkarə̃ kadɪɗakakre corresponds to male dɪarə̃ adɪɗakakre ‘I will take it off’.
[0] Ribeiro, Eduardo Rivail. 2012. A grammar of Karajá. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago; x+291pp.)
Scrolled all the way down until I found this example, you saved me a top-level comment.
Similarly, in yeshiva communities in the US men and women typically pronounce certain Hebrew vowels differently. I'm not sure what the historical context here is, but this always fascinated me. In any case, women and men speak in noticeably different ways about religious concepts, to the point where adopting the opposite gender's pronunciation stands out as "weird".
In addition to pronunciation differences, using more Aramaic and certain Yiddish phrases is male-coded in this community.
To add to this: hasidic men will often use Hebrew/Aramaic phrases used in the Talmud or its commentaries, whereas women, who are not permitted to study these materials, don't.
They are permitted to, they just usually don't bother. They would learn it as kids in school, and like kids everywhere they aren't volunteering for extra classes.
Some women will choose to do so as adults, but at that point it doesn't become part of the vocabulary.
If you mean that in your opinion (or according to your interpretation of Jewish law) they are permitted to...well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
If you mean that they believe themselves to be permitted to, this is definitely not the case. Talmud (ie Mishna/Gemara) outside of "agadata" is considered off-limits to women by all Haredi communities I'm aware of. In the past all Torah study was considered forbidden, but in the last few hundred years leniencies were found to enable some amount of Jewish religious education for girls. This was quite an innovation and was not taken lightly. Today, in some communities the original texts are all forbidden, but in most the Written Law (Tanach) is permitted why the Oral Law (Talmud) is not. Halacha (practical law) is usually allowed, as is theology, philosophy and ethics (Mussar, Chassidus, Rambam's "Shmoneh Prakim", etc)
Bottom line: women don't use scholarly jargon because they are intentionally and expressly excluded from such activities.
In hasidic communities women learn mostly Tanach (the Old Testament), Halacha (practical laws) and Mussar (roughly: ethics).
They absolutely do not learn the Talmud or its commentaries. In hasidic circles learning the Talmud – or any kind of in-depth abstract study – is said to lead women to "lightheadedness" aka promiscuity.
Just to be clear: the idea that Torah study leads women to promiscuity is not an invention of the GP (and may not be an opinion shared by them either). GP is quoting the Talmud.
<talmud>
The Mishna (Sotah 3.4) cites two Tannaitic opinions - the first says that a man is obligated to teach his daughter Torah so that she can understand the impact of the Sotah waters, the second counters that anyone who teaches his daughter Torah has taught her promiscuity.
The Gemara (Sotah 21b) clarifies that women who study Torah can become "clever" or "sneaky". Rashi (ibid, 11th century) explains that understanding the laws and loopholes enables them to hide their promiscuity and get away with things they wouldn't otherwise get away with.
For context the Mishna also comments that women are given to promiscuity by their nature, to the point where they would prefer promiscuity and a little wealth to a lot of wealth without promiscuity.
</talmud>
A few points from me:
* The context here is not studying theology at all, but legal topics, which is what most of the Talmud consists of. Only a small portion of the Talmud is theology, religion, and philosophy
* The Talmud is an anthology of many different opinions and ideas, often conflicting one another. There are passages in the Talmud that can be interpreted in a feminist light, but this is clearly not one of them. There is a lot of literature around this passage, and no small amount of controversy, but for the context of this thread - contemporary Haredi communities have interpreted this as forbidding women from studying the legal discourse aspects of the Torah while permitting the "lighter" topics, including theology. Other communities and movements interpret this differently or ignore it completely.
* My experience is that although the text cites promiscuity as the reason for the prohibition, that's not really what people think it's about, at least not today. If you ask most Haredi men why their wives are not allowed to study Talmud, I don't think they'll cite the promiscuity risk. Certainly not if you ask the women. Instead you'll probably get an explanation about gender roles, domains of authority, perhaps some narrative about men's brains and women's brains, maybe something about tradition, or just a shrug. If they're particularly learned they'll quote you this Talmud passage.
Talmud is not theological learning, it is mostly the discussions leading to the coded law, so a bit like a combination of law and logic reasoning. As previous comments mentioned, women can study ethics and the bible which is more theological in nature.
Mother-in-law-speech, where the language you use changes when you speak to your in-laws. There's an Australian language that has clicks, but only when talking to the mother in law.
In Slavic languages (i.e half Europe) the choice of past tense forms depends on the gender: "I said" is translated differently depending on whether "I" is male or female. I wouldn't say it's a totally different language, but translators often have to assume the gender when translating from a language which doesn't have such a feature.
I'm not sure that's quite right. Europe is typically divided in 3: Slavic, Germanic and Romance. By my count the population of Slavic countries adds up to 280 million of Europe's 750 million people.
It's not even unique to Slavic languages -- past tense is also formed through an adjective (and is subject to all gender agreement things) in French, so it may be something from PIE.
> Native Tongue [published 1984] is a feminist science fiction novel by American writer Suzette Haden Elgin, the first book in her series of the same name. The trilogy is centered in a future dystopian American society where the 19th Amendment was repealed in 1991[1] and women have been stripped of civil rights. A group of women, part of a worldwide group of linguists who facilitate human communication with alien races, create a new language for women as an act of resistance. Elgin created that language, Láadan, and instructional materials are available.
My favorite feature of Láadan is grammatical evidentiality, which I believe is based on real features of certain Native American languages. This is where you state how you know something, did you see it with your own eyes, hear it from a close friend, or just through the grapevine. There's even a particle for having dreamed it.
How is this different than English? For one, English relies heavily on the copula (is/to be) for statements of fact ("it is raining" vs "I see rain"), and secondly it's baked into the grammar. Stating something without evidence would sound just as wrong as "Me fail English? That's unpossible!"
The one exception might be the "uncertainty suffix" -ish.
This reminds me of the book Speaker for the Dead, which is book 2 in the Ender's game series. The creatures found on the new planet had different languages for men and women. I wonder if Orson Scott Card took inspiration from some of these cultures in building the narrative for the book!
Came here to say the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if he did take inspiration from those cultures; he was a missionary (for the LDS church) in Brazil.
One example here that's missed but I know from personal experience[0]: the Venda language of South Africa has two different words for "Hello" -- men say "Nda" which literally means "I am a lion," and women say "Aah" which as far as I learned doesn't mean anything in particular.
Not an exhaustive list there by any means. For example Hindi and many other languages from the subcontinent are spoken differently based in the speaker's gender, although not as pronounced a difference as to call them separate "dialects".
Japanese has greater cultural clout. There are probably more English speakers who know "konnichiwa" and vaguely recall hearing that men and women speak differently in Japanese, than English speakers who can recognize "sawatdee krap/ka" as a Thai greeting, let alone tell you which ending is used by female speakers and which by male ones.
A pidgin language is described in the article. I've heard about pidgin [0] in 2003, in the context of Hawaii, and I found the concept really fascinating.
If there’s a women’s-only language in the U.K. I’ve never heard of it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. I do however think the U.K. has different linguistic patterns for aristocracy vs. everyone else, both with the echo of Anglo-Saxon vs. Norman (cow/beef, sheep/mutton etc.); and also with the specific posh accent, formal modes of address that most people don’t bother with, and random use of Latin, Greek, and French.
Deborah Tannen's "You Just Don't Understand" discusses this idea. I found it pretty interesting.
Roughly, its thesis is that men typically interact with others in a competitive way, as if interactions are about status in a hierarchy; whereas typically women would prefer to interact in a cooperative way, where interactions are about belonging/intimacy. -- The different perspectives lend themselves to framing the same sets of actions in different ways.
-- The preface makes an interesting point: to the extent that differences in cultural attitudes leads to misunderstanding/conflict, it's worth trying to understand what those cultural differences are.
Her: We’ve been dating for six months and I’m all for taking it slow, but you haven’t even brought up the idea of moving in together? Like just to have the conversation? Like what am I to you?
There are some societies where men or women have a separate language--actually, "register" may be a better term--for ceremonies that are specific to that gender, like circumcision rituals and so on. Nigel Barley's memoir Ceremony tells about one of these, which has a Wikipedia entry here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%27bi_language
I was more speaking to some of the rather oppressive ones. I don’t find those that “rich” and my own culture has so many needlessly complex things in it that stem from not so rich backgrounds.
Languages used to be so much more fluid before the invention of printing. Now printing and primary schools have slowed the process down considerably, as well as destroyed a lot of smaller dialects that never made it to printed literature. Same for gender dialects, I presume.
You could argue though that printing and schools are part of the human evolution.
True. Irish in its heyday had four rather different dialects, but today only the artificial compromise "fifth province" amalgam is taught in schools.
Same with Japanese. There are some proudly, stubbornly distinct phrases in Kansai-ben and other regions, but the choice of the Meiji-era government to only teach Standard Tokyo Japanese in schools has had the desired homogenising effect.
Even as recently as the 1940s, there are well-documented cases of teens from the south of England, sent to the north of England, to work in mines for the war effort, who simply could not understand the variety of English being spoken around them. Radio and TV smoothed out all those differences.
Language death has nothing to do with fitness, and these languages are not being "selected against" by the presence (or absence) of some linguistic characteristic. Languages die out because the groups that speak them assimilate into other groups, taking on their language and culture.
Especially seeing as hugely dominant languages like Mandarin and English are so difficult to write, and one would assume that ease of literacy would contribute to fitness.
But it's selection based on non-linguistic criteria, like who's better at violence and economics. So it affects language, but it is not based in language, and thus GP's insinuation that this linguistic feature is a "bad idea from a natural selection point of view" and this is somehow related to those languages' so-called obscurity does not make sense.
For it to make sense, language replacement (which is an observable phenomenon) would have to happen by communities learning a bunch of different languages and picking the one that they liked best. That's just not how it goes. You learn a new language to speak with new people that you're interested in, regardless of how weird and hard to learn their language is.
Indeed. English is as dominant in the world as it is today probably because England and the USA have (or had) plenty of shallow coal, iron, and (relevant after the "special relationship") oil deposits, not because of any particular linguistic efficiency.
Too late to the party with just that resource. Engines that most efficiently use oil came about only after the era of history when engines that need coal were dominant.
Fun bit of alt-history pondering - China was the most powerful single nation on Earth at the time of the dawn of the industrial revolution - it's quite plausible that they missed out on that lead just because of a couple of shallow whitewater sections of the Yangtze river that made bringing their coal by barge to the coastal cities impractical.
No, they missed out on it because of bureaucratic stupidity.
There was a Chinese industrial revolution in, IIRC, the 1100s and/or 1200s. They were producing something on the order of 100,000 tons of iron a year, with the whole industrial revolution "using the outputs to improve the efficiency" cycle starting to happen.
And then the bureaucrats shut it down, because "the wrong kind of people" were getting rich from it.
They could have owned the world. They could have been the ones with the technological and manufacturing dominance. And instead they threw it away to keep their society stratified in the way they thought it should be. The Chinese "century of humiliation" was caused by that decision back in the 1200s.
Judging the quality of something primarily based on its prevalence is a questionable idea as well (no offense). The better argument could be that some of these languages are the result of violent conquest, the subjugation of (indigenous) women and children, and possibly also of the scarcity of meaningful communication between genders.
When they lived in Japan for a while he was frequently the subject of jokes about how "he speaks like a woman" among male Japanese native speakers.
See https://bondlingo.tv/blog/male-and-female-japanese-how-males...