The gender of gender
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For English speakers, a mind-boggling letter to the editor on linguistic gender from the Times Literary Supplement (3/9/25):
Masculine and feminine
In Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me, reviewed by Lucy Popescu (In Brief, April 18), a character points out that “in Spanish, the word victim, or victima, is always feminine”. This is evidently true, but it would be wrong to draw conclusions regarding any inherently gendered notions of victimhood from this fact; the Spanish word for person (la persona) is also feminine, but it does not therefore follow that persons are essentially female.
Many languages have a range of noun classifications and, while gender is among them, this has nothing to do with femininity or masculinity. Gender has the same root as genre and genus, so, in a grammatical context, refers to the category of a noun and is usually determined by its final syllable; hence, victima is “feminine” because it ends with an “a”. English-speakers, accustomed to a mother tongue without such noun classifications, may find it difficult to divorce the idea of gender from concepts of male/female, let alone avoid the temptation to find significance in a word’s gender. But many nouns belong to a gender category at complete variance with their meaning: the Spanish word for masculinity (la masculinidad) is feminine because -idad is a feminine ending. In contrast, el feminismo (feminism) is masculine because -ismo is a masculine ending. Nor is it only in Romance languages where such discrepancies occur; like its Spanish and French counterparts, the German word for “manliness” (die Männlichkeit) is feminine.
Etymologically, all versions of the word victim derive from the Latin victima and originally referred to a living creature offered in sacrifice to a deity. While meaning and usage have broadened over time to signify someone hurt by another in some way, conflating the word victim with concepts of the feminine risks presenting women as passive and powerless.
Rory McDowall Clark
St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex
Selected readings
See the Language Log archive on gender.
[Thanks to Leslie Katz]
Martin Holterman said,
June 6, 2025 @ 5:21 am
Yes! And this becomes particularly annoying when native speakers of English then start explaining to native speakers of gendered languages that they are doing grammatical gender wrong. (And worse still when they start succeeding, like in French and German.)
Phillip Helbig said,
June 6, 2025 @ 5:37 am
@Martin: What do you mean by succeeding in French and German?
Noam said,
June 6, 2025 @ 6:52 am
As a native speaker of a gendered language and a native-equivalent speaker of English, I disagree with @Martin, at least in principle. Maybe it’s because I now mostly speak English, but I feel like the grammatical gender of words does affect their connotation for me. And I can absolutely see how that would bother people for good reason. But the real question (which I feel could be addressed empirically) is whether this is true more widely , or just a side effect of my particular experience (or even just a personal idiosyncrasy).
languagehat said,
June 6, 2025 @ 8:04 am
LH discussion.
Jerry Packard said,
June 6, 2025 @ 11:04 am
“ the real question (which I feel could be addressed empirically) is whether this is true more widely…”
There are a lot of experimental studies on the perceptual effects of grammatical gender. Very generally speaking, grammatical gender does have an effect on the perception of actual gender and other semantic elements.
JMGN said,
June 6, 2025 @ 11:14 am
Best I've read so far:
https://www.cepc.gob.es/sites/default/files/2021-12/3904909-victoria-escandell-vidal.html
Jarek Weckwerth said,
June 6, 2025 @ 11:38 am
@Noam: Absolutely. One such area is personification in fiction or poetry. In my language, when vegetables are personified, the onion is the wife, and the beetroot is the husband. Why? Of course, you guessed.
David Cameron Staples said,
June 6, 2025 @ 4:29 pm
The study I remember seeing once compared native speakers of languages where the gender of the word for some common object differed, and compared the adjectives used to describe them.
For a bridge, for example, French native speakers (le pont, masculine) used words like "strong, solid, heavy", but German speakers (die Brüke, feminine) used words like "graceful, elegant".
Damned if I can find it now.
JMGN said,
June 6, 2025 @ 5:27 pm
@Staples
No worries, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Barbara Phillips Long said,
June 7, 2025 @ 2:53 am
When I started learning French in seventh grade, my mother told me about her beginning French lessons, which as I recall, involved “la plume de ma tante.” Now I am wondering if “la plume de mon oncle” might have felt like a mixed gendered phrase to the textbook writer. Are there gender patterns in introductory texts in gendered languages? Do modern textbooks show the same patterns as textbooks from the last century, or were there no patterns?
For those who are curious, my initial foray into French began with “J’entre dans la salle de classe. Je dis ‘Bonjour’ a la maîtresse.”
David Marjanović said,
June 7, 2025 @ 8:19 am
Maybe it's an allusion to the current trend of doing the opposite of what English does – to "make women visible"? That is about indicating social, not (just) grammatical, gender in words for people instead of using the – almost always shorter – masculine form and backtracking to "oh, it's meant to cover everyone" if pressed.