Want to hear about a weird language quirk? Of course you do, you follow my blog.
The French language gives gender to every noun. Tables, thermometers, rocks, and keys all have a gender. Abstract concepts like love and discontent also have gender. You and I have a gender, and so do our fingernails and socks and vestigial organs.
Now listen, there’s a difference between linguistic gender and the gender you’re thinking of (the kind with reveal parties and Tennessee’s General Assembly First Amendment violations). Linguistic gender helps to delineate differences between words, which is really helpful in a language that has a limited scope of pronunciation, like French.
What this means, in practice, is that the French language doesn’t really have a word for “it.” You and I use that word to refer to objects. “When you are finished with the cup, put it down.”
Since every single word in French is gendered, that sentence actually looks more like: “When you are finished with the cup, put her down.”
What does this mean for the classroom? It means that French people learning English essentially have to learn a third “neutral” gender. I can’t tell you how many times a new learner has told me that they lost their pencil and can’t find him. Right now we are learning about women in STEM for Women’s History Month, and my first year students keep referring to Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin as “it.”
Don’t judge! Imagine how difficult it would be for you to learn a fifth gender. The English language effectively has four grammatical genders: masculine (he), feminine (she), neutral singular object (it), and neutral singular or plural (they).
Imagine I gave you a new one. Let’s call it animate-inanimate gender. Let’s say that you now need to gender every noun according to whether it is animate or inanimate. So now, a tree is a tree-a if it is alive, but a tree-u if it is dead. Doesn’t that seem frivolous and difficult to master?
That example I gave above is an actual grammatical structure in Kurdish. This means that everyone who speaks Kurdish will look out on a room of objects and instinctively categorize everything as either alive or dead. The French do the same thing, but with masculinity and femininity.
Plenty of languages don’t have gender at all. Lots of Polynesian languages don’t have “he” or “she,” but rather just one word for both. Same goes for Tagalog, Armenian, and Swahili. Imagine how differently speakers of these languages must perceive gender, since they do not instinctively categorize objects or even people by gender upon first interaction.
The big takeaway here (for me) is that even on the linguistic level, gender is something different to each culture. There’s no set standard, not in grammar, and not in personhood. Just food for thought in this The Year of Our Lord twenty twenty-three.
Bises,
Allison
P.S.: I’m in Prague this weekend, so if any of you know a spot there I absolutely need to hit up, let me know.
Flan in France 