Psycholinguistic investigations of the way readers and speakers perceive gender have shown several biases associated with how gender is linguistically realized in language. Although such variations across languages offer interesting grounds for legitimate cross-linguistic comparisons, pertinent characteristics of grammatical systems — especially in terms of their gender asymmetries — have to be clearly identified. In this paper, we present a language index for researchers interested in the effect of grammatical gender on the mental representations of women and men.
Our index is based on five main language groups i. Our index goes beyond existing ones in that it provides specific dimensions relevant to those interested in psychological and sociological impacts of language on the way we perceive women and men. We also offer a critical discussion of any endeavor to classify languages according to grammatical gender. The way we perceive women and men in society is partly grounded in the way we speak or write about these two groups. As such, language acts not only as a vehicle for beliefs, but also as a tool that builds them.
For example, ordinary people, as well as the media, communicate gender-stereotypical expectations with regard to gender-appropriate behaviors and roles for women and men, and such communication might lead individuals to define themselves and behave in accord with these expectations e. Consequently, one can easily argue that language biases gender representations through its communicative functions.
However, language contributes to biased gender representations in other ways, with its intrinsic characteristics creeping into the way we perceive women and men. There are different ways that this can happen. For example, at a syntactic level, word order may signal to readers or listeners specific semantic and societal hierarchies e.
Referring to a woman and a man or to a man and a woman is not perceived as being the same, and the resulting biased representations — toward the first person mentioned — have been well documented Hegarty et al.
