This semester in college, I pledged a professional fraternity for international relations and foreign service, Delta Phi Epsilon. One of our pledging homework assignments was a "blog" of sorts: we researched a topic extensively and wrote about it. Around the same time this assignment was given to us, I was learning about profession nouns in French.

French is a gendered language, grammatically speaking, and I learned that some French profession nouns only have a masculine form--even if women held these positions. I became interested in this phenomenon; while writing a French essay, I tried to mention my French GSI who is a woman. I didn't know how to address her.

"La professeur" didn't work because the feminine article "la" does not match the masculine noun "professeur," and "le professeur" didn't work because she wasn't a man, and "le professeur" implies that the professor is a man. How, then, could I even make the distinction of gender behind the title? Did this have greater social implications? And thus, I made this my pledge blog research topic. We had to write three installations of the blog, and here is the first one:

Despite what strides have been made in the feminist movement, woman is still often see as lesser than man. While this may stem from many different factors, language certainly contributes to it. The extent to which language dictates society is debated hotly--and there are a wide range of opinions on each side of the debate--but it is hard to argue that language holds absolutely no power in human life. For example, in the late 1980s, The Sunday Times printed an article including these words:

"The lack of vitality is aggravated by the fact that there are so few able-bodied young adults about. They have all gone off to work or look for work, leaving behind the old, the disabled, the women and the children."

Not only does this excerpt have ableist and ageist connotations, it has a misogynistic message as well. By removing "women" from the categories of "able-bodied" and "adults," the article essentially assumes that women are not capable of "[going] off to work or look for work." The very language we speak--along with many other languages around the world--systematically built sexism into grammar and lexicon. The reason for misogyny and sexism is not only written in history, is right here in today's society as well. Countries suffering from severe sexism more than likely harbor a man's language as the official one (Saul & Diaz-Leon, 2018).

"A man's language" can appear in many ways: for one, a grammatically gendered language seems to fall to a masculine default; in addition, even in an increasingly gender-neutral language like English (the Standard American English dialect), the word "man" is used all too oftenly to describe people of all genders. In languages like German and English, there is a third, neutral gender--the English "it." The words "they" or "them" don't denote gender. However, in languages like Spanish and French, there is no third, neutral gender. Thus, if there was a group of a hundred females and one male, it would still be referred to in the masculine grammar.

French is a very gendered, and very well-protected language. In fact, the Académie Française exists to protect the French language. Members of the Académie are called "les immortels," or "the immortals." Further, the motto of this institution is "à l'immortalité," which means "to immortality." This should provide an idea on how adamant the French Academy is to keeping their language unchanged. However, language change is almost always inevitable, regardless of how many protection institutions are established. Without change, a language will stray increasingly far from the lives of its speakers; especially with globalization, change happens ever rapidly with loan words, slang appearances, and social movements. Essentially, a language can either change or die fighting.

Such is the case with the rigidly gendered nouns of French. A French noun almost always takes an article, whether definite (le, la, les, ce, cette, cet, ces, etc.) or indefinite (un, une, de, des, etc.). There is a significantly larger number of French articles than English ones (the, that, a, an, etc.) because of the way French is gendered. Not only does the gender of the article have to match the gender of the noun, all adjectives modifying the noun have to be accordingly gendered as well. From a purely technical standpoint, the linguistics behind gendered languages should not cause a social issue; on paper, the noun classes are merely ways to categorize words in a language, and the gender of a noun should not necessarily apply to real-life, breathing human gender.

However, because language plays such a large part in the human brain, gendered languages do influence the way speakers think and regard the respective human genders. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that the way a language's grammar and lexicon work can change the way a speaker perceives the world around them. For example, some Aboriginal languages do not have relative directional terms (in English, we have words like "right" and "left," but in this Aboriginal language, speakers refer to direction with words like "north," "south," "east," and "west) (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010).

UC San Diego professor Lera Boroditsky conducted an experiment where speakers of English, speakers of Hebrew, and speakers of a specific Aboriginal group had to arrange a timeline of pictures. The timeline was fairly straightforward; for example, it might have been a banana, going from unripe to ripe to rotting. Or, it could have been a baby growing from toddler to adolescence to adulthood. There was a clear order of events, but the direction the subjects arranged the pictures varied.

The English language reads left to right, so the timeline made by English speakers was arranged from left to right. Hebrew reads right to left, so the timeline started from the right and ended on the left. The Aboriginal language, however, is read from east to west. If the Aboriginal language speaker was facing south, the timeline of pictures would go from left to right (east to west, essentially); if the speaker was facing north, the timeline would go from right to left (still east to west); if the speaker was facing east, the timeline would start from a point far away from the speaker's body and be constructed in a way that it came toward the body.

Tangents aside, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is supported by not only this example, but many others as well (including, but not limited to, experiments surrounding Mandarin, Greek, and Russian). This means that language does, indeed, affect the way a speaker thinks. If a language has misogyny in its roots, speakers of that language are much more likely to adopt the same mindset. The language virtually opens up the possibility of misogyny to its speakers. While there are a plethora of languages with strict gender rules, French stands out above many because of the Académie Française's existence.

Like most other Romance language-speaking countries, France has a history of sexism. This isn't to say that other, non-gendered languages are free of sexism. Sexism can be traced back to many different sources; my argument here is that language is one of those contributing sources. According to UC Berkeley French Department professor Mairi McLaughlin and GSI Sarah Christofides, the issue is about textual visibility of females and the historical suppression of feminine textual visibility.

In France, young girls could choose to attend school, but they were often taken out of the education system earlier than boys were. In addition, French society assumed that girls did not attend school for the purpose of holding any sort of political office; girls could not assume leadership positions within society because of the misogynistic views of the time.

Conveniently, many French profession nouns do not have a feminine form. Whether the sexist mindset or the sexist language came first, the game of "chicken or the egg" is not necessary to see that this sexism is still prevalent in today's world.

In French, the indefinite feminine article is "une" and the indefinite masculine article is "un." Most nonhuman nouns have their gender set in stone, but a few French profession nouns can toggle between genders by adding or changing an affix (most of the time, this affix is the suffix) in the word. For example, "un pharmacien" is a male pharmacist, while "une pharmacienne" is a female pharmacist. Notice that in English, a pharmacist is just that--a pharmacist. The gender is not revealed; rather, the addition of the preceding "male" or "female" denotes the gender of the pharmacist.

However, some French profession nouns don't have a feminine version of the word. A professor in French is just "un professeur," and "une professeure" does not exist according to L'Académie Française, even though it theoretically follows the feminizing grammatical rule.

This has spurred a divisive debate in France as well as other Francophone countries. Canada has a slightly more progressive take on the issue, and Quebecois lexicographers have actually added "une professeure" into dictionaries, thanks to a widespread Canadian view that professions should have word forms for all genders.

However, the issue goes beyond just changing the spelling of one word--or in France's case, the lack thereof. Misogyny boils down to being a social issue, and all the dictionaries in the world could be edited, but no concrete change will occur without a shift in mindset by speakers of the language. Because L'Académie Française is so set on its traditional, conservative values, the mindset change is more difficult for people living in France than those living in Canada. Many feminists want to take advantage of L'Académie Française's stubbornness and adopt masculine professional nouns anyway, thereby reinforcing that women can hold the same title--literally--as men. Still others disagree, arguing that in either case, people who identify as non gender binary will be left out of the picture; because French does not have a neutral pronoun, though, this issue is even harder to solve.

The French language appears flawed because humankind is flawed; the title of "gendered languages" is merely a label and should never have had real social impacts, but people can't seem to dissociate grammatical gender from human gender. Because of this, society must work to combat the social injustices historically bestowed upon the oppressed; it must also work to turn the tides for future generations. Language modification seems like a good starting point.

Sources:

Brick, Noelle & Clarissa Wilks. 1994. Et Dieu nomma la femme: observations sur la question de la féminisation des noms d'agent et sur les désignations d'Edith Cresson dans la presse. Journal of French language studies.

Boroditsky, L., & Gaby, A. (2010). Remembrances of Times East: Absolute Spatial Representations of Time in an Australian Aboriginal Community. Psychological Science, 21(11), 1635–1639.

Cameron, Deborah, 1985, Feminism and Linguistic Theory, Basingstoke and London: MacMillan.

Ransbo, Gunilla. 1992. La femme dans la vie professionelle: un problème de genre en français moderne. Studia Neophilologica.

Revell, Donald L, Cornelia Schuh & Michel Moisan. 'Themself' and nonsexist style in Canadian legislative drafting. English Today.

Rey, Alain. 2006. Le Robert Micro: dictionnaire d'apprentissage de la langue française. Paris: Dictionnaires le Robert.

Saul, Jennifer and Diaz-Leon, Esa, "Feminist Philosophy of Language", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

I will be sharing the other two parts of my pledge blog in the next two parts of this sociolinguistics series. I included my references if anyone was curious and wanted to do further reading into the topic. Keep your eyes peeled for next week, where I go more in depth with this issue!