6 ms·

This seems to be conflating grammatical gender - which includes differences in pronouns, adjectives, sometimes verbs, and pronunciation, but is still based on r

This seems to be conflating grammatical gender - which includes differences in pronouns, adjectives, sometimes verbs, and pronunciation, but is still based on relatively minor variations in a common vocabulary - with full dialects, which can have very distinct vocabularies and may include words with unique meanings. English is at the de-grammarised end of the spectrum. There are gendered clues in English, but they're (mostly) not baked into the grammar. The differences are more about specific idioms and expressions that one gender is more likely to use, and they're really a kind of variation on other subgroup slangs - like teen slang, other age-related indicators. Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it's... just there. It doesn't do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns. Fully distinct dialects/languages are incredibly rare and are often artificial and/or more likely to be created by a subculture than as a direct result of gender differences. Example: English has Polari, which was entertainer/street slang and often used in gay subcultures. It also has Cockney, Estuary, Northern, Scottish, Urban, and others - all differentiated by culture.

the_af 5y ago
> Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it's... just there. It doesn't do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns. I can't speak for all Romance languages but my native Spanish: it's true that we have gendered nouns (most if not all of them, I think) but it has nothing to do with the speaker, so it's not a language for men or women. For example, a chair ("silla") is always female, regardless of whether it's me saying it (a male) or my mother. It's a bit like how ships in English are a "she" regardless of who's speaking, only more enforced and for all nouns.
- okal 5y ago
  An interesting Romance counter-example is "Obrigado" vs "Obrigada" ("thank you", in Portuguese). I'm not even remotely fluent, but if I recall correctly, the gender is dependent on the speaker, not the person being addressed.
  - the_af 5y ago
    Oh, yes, but those aren't nouns. I didn't mean Spanish isn't gendered -- it obviously is -- but that gendered nouns aren't indicative of the gender of the speaker, so that particular observation was unrelated to the topic under discussion. Your example is indeed an example of gendered language depending on the speaker, and has similar examples in Spanish (e.g. "contento" / "contenta" for "happy").
  - codethief 5y ago
    Well, practically all adjectives in Spanish/Portuguese/French/Italian change depending on the grammatical gender of the noun they refer to. And, of course, if the noun in question is "I" (as in your case), then they reveal the (physical) gender of the speaker because usually grammatical gender of a person == physical gender of that person But compared to the differences in, e.g., Japanese that some people here are discussing, this seems rather minor.
  - n4r9 5y ago
    I've heard of this example before, and this is speculative but I wonder if it's because the speaker is counter-intuitively also the object of the phrase. The root "obrigad" sounds a lot like the English word "obligate". If this is more than just a coincidence, then a more direct translation is "I am obliged" rather than "thank you". Said this way it makes a lot of sense why the verb is determined by the speaker.
    - telmo 5y ago
      Yes, this is exactly the reason. (I am a native speaker)
      - the-smug-one 5y ago
        Can it be extended with a reference to the (self-)object? Like "me llamo" being "I call myself" in Spanish for "my name is".
        the_af 5y ago
retrac 5y ago
I used Japanese, like the article did, as an example for this reason. Japanese has no grammatical gender like French. But Japanese is gendered. There are patterns in Japanese, where men and women use pronouns differently, and have slightly different patterns to which grammatical forms they use, and when. Women tend to use polite forms, in pronoun and noun choice as well as verb conjugation, more than men do. Small differences in sentence final particles, and so on. In practice the standard language becomes nearly gender-neutral in formal, polite contexts. Still, there's a real effect in Japanese, where men and women do speak and even write slightly differently. Male students of Japanese can even suffer a problem where they sound effeminate because they have modelled themselves on teachers who are mostly women. I was just observing this general effect is probably true, to some degree, big or small, for most languages. It's probably a little more pronounced in Japanese than English. In neither case is it anywhere distinct enough to call it a separate dialect for men and women. > Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. Grammatical gender like French or Arabic is pretty unusual, really. It's common in the Indo-European and Semitic languages, which are prominent by number of speakers, but grammatical gender is fairly rare when surveying the world's language families as a whole. It's completely absent from many of them. The whole Sino-Tibetan language family (including modern Chinese), for example. They get along fine with a single third person pronoun (in speech) and no grammatical gender.
- emteycz 5y ago
  I don't see how is grammatical gender relevant to this. Czech has it, and both males and females speak it the same. Different suffixes are used to refer to yourself but nobody would think of that as "men/women language" as it's exactly what the others use when speaking about men/women.
- ggrrhh_ta 5y ago
  Turkish, an indoeuropean language, has no grammatical gender markers.
  - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    Turkish is not Indo-European
guerrilla 5y ago
I don't think you understood what you're responding to as it was not talking about grammatical gender, which is why it mentioned the use of statistical methods. The claim was that men and women do write in different dialects although they are less pronounced than in other languages.
- StuffMaster 5y ago
  I thought I read about one such study. IIRC it said women use more personal pronouns in academic papers. Take with grain of salt.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

the_af 5y ago

> Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it's... just there. It doesn't do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns. I can't speak for all Romance languages but my native Spanish: it's true that we have gendered nouns (most if not all of them, I think) but it has nothing to do with the speaker, so it's not a language for men or women. For example, a chair ("silla") is always female, regardless of whether it's me saying it (a male) or my mother. It's a bit like how ships in English are a "she" regardless of who's speaking, only more enforced and for all nouns.

okal 5y ago
An interesting Romance counter-example is "Obrigado" vs "Obrigada" ("thank you", in Portuguese). I'm not even remotely fluent, but if I recall correctly, the gender is dependent on the speaker, not the person being addressed.
- the_af 5y ago
  Oh, yes, but those aren't nouns. I didn't mean Spanish isn't gendered -- it obviously is -- but that gendered nouns aren't indicative of the gender of the speaker, so that particular observation was unrelated to the topic under discussion. Your example is indeed an example of gendered language depending on the speaker, and has similar examples in Spanish (e.g. "contento" / "contenta" for "happy").
- codethief 5y ago
  Well, practically all adjectives in Spanish/Portuguese/French/Italian change depending on the grammatical gender of the noun they refer to. And, of course, if the noun in question is "I" (as in your case), then they reveal the (physical) gender of the speaker because usually grammatical gender of a person == physical gender of that person But compared to the differences in, e.g., Japanese that some people here are discussing, this seems rather minor.
- n4r9 5y ago
  I've heard of this example before, and this is speculative but I wonder if it's because the speaker is counter-intuitively also the object of the phrase. The root "obrigad" sounds a lot like the English word "obligate". If this is more than just a coincidence, then a more direct translation is "I am obliged" rather than "thank you". Said this way it makes a lot of sense why the verb is determined by the speaker.
  - telmo 5y ago
    Yes, this is exactly the reason. (I am a native speaker)
    - the-smug-one 5y ago
      Can it be extended with a reference to the (self-)object? Like "me llamo" being "I call myself" in Spanish for "my name is".
      - the_af 5y ago

retrac 5y ago

I used Japanese, like the article did, as an example for this reason. Japanese has no grammatical gender like French. But Japanese is gendered. There are patterns in Japanese, where men and women use pronouns differently, and have slightly different patterns to which grammatical forms they use, and when. Women tend to use polite forms, in pronoun and noun choice as well as verb conjugation, more than men do. Small differences in sentence final particles, and so on. In practice the standard language becomes nearly gender-neutral in formal, polite contexts. Still, there's a real effect in Japanese, where men and women do speak and even write slightly differently. Male students of Japanese can even suffer a problem where they sound effeminate because they have modelled themselves on teachers who are mostly women. I was just observing this general effect is probably true, to some degree, big or small, for most languages. It's probably a little more pronounced in Japanese than English. In neither case is it anywhere distinct enough to call it a separate dialect for men and women. > Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. Grammatical gender like French or Arabic is pretty unusual, really. It's common in the Indo-European and Semitic languages, which are prominent by number of speakers, but grammatical gender is fairly rare when surveying the world's language families as a whole. It's completely absent from many of them. The whole Sino-Tibetan language family (including modern Chinese), for example. They get along fine with a single third person pronoun (in speech) and no grammatical gender.

emteycz 5y ago
I don't see how is grammatical gender relevant to this. Czech has it, and both males and females speak it the same. Different suffixes are used to refer to yourself but nobody would think of that as "men/women language" as it's exactly what the others use when speaking about men/women.
ggrrhh_ta 5y ago
Turkish, an indoeuropean language, has no grammatical gender markers.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  Turkish is not Indo-European

guerrilla 5y ago

I don't think you understood what you're responding to as it was not talking about grammatical gender, which is why it mentioned the use of statistical methods. The claim was that men and women do write in different dialects although they are less pronounced than in other languages.

StuffMaster 5y ago
I thought I read about one such study. IIRC it said women use more personal pronouns in academic papers. Take with grain of salt.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]