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references about "Genderless Language"

In this article, I am planning to add the term of nonsexist language and present examples about this term. Also, because we are facing related issues in our societies today regarding of transgender and gender equality; this topic will help us understand other cultures. Moreover, I will add some examples about disadvantages in genderless languages from the morphological perspective. Finally, I will add facts about how colonization, Western culture, and religion influenced in some of the genderless languages by adopting the binary system.

1. Hellinger, Marlis, and Heiko Motschenbacher, eds. Gender across languages. Vol. 4. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015.
== 2. Prewitt-freilino, J., Caswell, T. A., & Laakso, E. K. (2012). The gendering of language: A comparison of gender equality in countries with gendered, natural gender, and genderless languages. Sex Roles, 66(3-4), 268-281. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.fiu.edu/10.1007/s11199-011-0083-5 ==

7. Urdze, Aina, Martine Vanhove, and Thomas Stolz. Morphologies in Contact. N.p.: Akademie Verlag, 2012.
Language Contact

From the morphological point of view, grammatical gender may arise because of language contact. For example, Greek has lost its three genders do to the impact of the genderless Turkish language. The same way the Persian grammatical gender was influenced by the Turkish language. According to Heine (1978), these were called the universals simplification in the reduction of sex system. Corbett (2005) survey about gender system around the world from 256 languages shows that 112 (44%) are grammatical gender and 144 languages (56%) are genderless languages. Since this two types of languages in many cases are geographically close to each other, there is a big chance that one influence the other. For example, Basque is considered genderless language, but it has influenced by Spanish masculine - feminine binary system.

In many cases, gender has associated with words but not with ideas. Many scholars are trying to study the development of gender in nouns that have loaned from other languages. One example of this innovations is the gender assignment from the Italian Americans to the genderless English names. The phonological form of the loan word sometimes determines its sex. For example, for American Italian does not identify the word freezer, instead heard "freezə." This sound is similar to schwa /a/, so the word becomes "frisa." Consequently, the new word ends in /a/ which is feminine. The same happen with the words water (la vuora), the sweater (la suera), and the quarter (la quora). These process not only happen to American Italian but also to American-German and American Frech. In English words ending in -ing sounds like French -ine and German -ung which are feminine suffixes. In case the genderless nouns do not generate one gender or another, in American Italian masculine gender is the default gender. This default automatically happens in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Norwegian and Old English.

Masculine Generic

The way societies use sex or gender in their languages differ based on their culture. Genderless languages absence of feminine and masculine noun and pronoun in most of the time use a specific pronoun to represent both. Masculine generics have used to mention people with unknown sex. The using of masculine generics could be negatively for women because eventually, this internalizes in society as a norm. For example, using fireman, businessman, or referring to all professors as he may generate cognitive effects. The best solution according to (Stahlberg 2007) is to use for example firefighters instead of fireman. Genderless languages may contribute to making women invisible in their societies and prevent women to succeed in principal male occupations.

Sex and Grammatical Structure When we study the variable of sex figures in grammatical languages, we find a variety of structural differences. Genderless languages around the world do not have grammatical gender in the noun system and sex differences in their personal pronouns. For this reasons, most nouns, and pronouns are using for female and male. However, sex is also expressed in genderless languages by the using of lexical means like Turkish Erkek "man, male," kiz "girl" etc. Even Genderless language have masculine generics. In Turkish, for example, the noun adam means both "man" and "human being."