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g&l (print) issn 1747–6321
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https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.31445
Article
The origin of sexism in language
Ann Coady
Abstract
Although previous work on sexist linguistic structures has identied the causes
of sexism in language as stemming from an androcentric world view, it has not
described the social and semiotic processes involved in the historic production
and reproduction of this kind of linguistic sexism. is article uses the three
processes of iconisation, fractal recursivity, and erasure to bring together what
appear to be disparate phenomena (such as the masculine generic, and even
the very existence of the feminine grammatical gender) into a unifying theory.
Iconisation results in the binary division of humanity into females and males;
fractal recursivity explains how this division was projected onto language; and
erasure demonstrates how certain discourses have been ignored, to the prot of
others. A Queer critique of the two concepts of binarity and markedness (which
arise as a result of iconisation) opens up exciting new ways to approach sexism
in language, and to revitalise research in this area.
: ; ; ;
Introduction
In October 2014 during a parliamentary debate in the French lower chamber,
right-wing representative Julien Aubert (UMP) addressed the left-wing rep-
resentative, Sandrine Mazetier (PS1), as ‘Mme le président’ in the masculine.
After stopping him, and asking him to refer to her as ‘Madame la présidente’,
Aubert refused, claiming that he was simply following the standard rules of
Aliation
Sheeld Hallam University, UK.
email: anncoady@gmail.com
272 ANN COADY
French, and that ‘Madame la présidente’ was the wife of a president, not a
president in her own right (Le Monde 2014). Aubert was reprimanded and
ned a quarter of his monthly parliamentary allowance, and a media debate
ensued (Fracchiolla 2014). Some job titles in French are dicult to feminise
(e.g. docteur / médecin [doctor]), and others have negative connotations in
the feminine (un entrâineur [trainer / coach] vs une entraîneuse [a woman
employed in a night club whose job is to encourage clients to drink]. As for
gender agreement rules, the masculine takes precedence when both mascu-
line and feminine nouns share the same satellite elements. Even in a sentence
like un homme et cinq milliards de femmes sont morts [one man
and ve billion women died], where women clearly outnumber men, the past
participle of the verb to die is traditionally in the masculine form morts not
the feminine mortes.
ese examples serve to illustrate that sexist linguistic structures, such
as the masculine unmarked generic form, are still an important problem in
languages with grammatical gender. is article demonstrates how three
linguistic processes used in the eld of language ideology (LI): iconisation,
fractal recursivity, and erasure (Irvine and Gal 2000) can be usefully com-
bined to examine the origin of sexism in language. In this article ‘sexism in
language’ refers to structural linguistic phenomena like the unmarked mas-
culine, and gender agreement rules. e three concepts of iconisation, fractal
recursivity, and erasure permit us to bring together previous work on sexism
in language into one unifying theory, and provide ‘a ne-grained discourse
analytical apparatus that allows us to tease out how social boundaries and
inequalities are enacted through an ideological matrix where representations
of language intersect with images of age, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, etc.’
(Milani 2010:121). Debates surrounding language and grammatical gender
go at least as far back as ancient Greeks (Corbeill 2008:75; Baron 1986:28),
and although some work has been done on the origin of sexist language and/
or the origin of grammatical gender (Luraghi 2009b, 2011; Michard 1996;
Violi 1987; McConnell-Ginet 1984), they have rarely discussed the processes
involved in these phenomena. Indeed, Milani notes that work needs to be
carried out on ‘how such boundaries and intersections may become conven-
tionalized and naturalized’ (Milani 2010:121), and Blommaert argues that
the ‘historical production and reproduction of language ideologies, needs to
be lled in’ (Blommaert 1999:1).
is article aims to ll this gap, by peeling back the historical layer of
ideologies, and tracing the social mechanisms that have resulted in sexist
linguistic structures today. Without this historical knowledge, it is impos-
sible to fully assess current research ndings (Cameron 1995:x), and the
impact of language planning.
THE ORIGIN OF SEXISM IN LANGUAGE 273
Although most of the examples in this article will be taken from French,
the following analysis of the emergence of sexist language will be pertinent
to most European languages. Whereas in English the generic function of
the masculine was the central problem for Second Wave feminist linguistic
reform, in French the debate has, until very recently, concentrated on the
feminisation of job titles (Elmiger 2008:111), using the visibility principle
rather than neutralisation. is has been criticised by Queer linguists as
a political and epistemological cul-de-sac which results in entrenching
gender dierence (Chetcuti and Greco 2012:11). In fact, Motschenbacher
argues that ‘every time speakers or writers use binarily gendered forms,
they reinstantiate the discursive formation of the heteronormative system’
(Motschenbacher 2014:250). But speakers of grammatically gendered
languages have very little choice regarding binarily gendered forms, for
example French only has two genders – feminine and masculine, there is
no neuter. Even in languages such as German, which has a neuter gender,
as opposed to an uter (or common) gender (Motschenbacher 2010:77), it is
mostly used to refer to inanimate objects, and only very rarely for animate
beings, and so is not a solution to neutralise gender.
Research on sexist linguistic structures is often seen as ‘outdated and
archaic’ (Mills 2008:9) as it seems to be incompatible with poststructuralist
theories about the uidity and performative nature of gender (Motschen-
bacher 2015:29); that is, whether words and grammar are understood to be
sexist is highly context-dependent. As such, work on sexist linguistic struc-
tures has been marginalised in the English-dominated eld of gender and
language over the past two decades (Motschenbacher 2015:28). However,
Queer linguistics opens up exciting new avenues for the study of sexism in
language. Although most work on sexism in language has been done from
a feminist perspective, this does not mean that it is incompatible with a
Queer approach. Indeed, Mills (2008:6f ) notes that sexism needs to be re-
examined in the light of Queer theory, and Jagose highlights ‘the diculty,
even the impossibility, of distinguishing decisively between feminist and
queer critical traditions’ (Jagose 2009:172). us, the second aim of this
article is to demonstrate how a Second Wave focus on sexism in language,
can be fruitfully combined with Queer linguistics.
Queer linguistics
Traditionally, feminist linguistics has concentrated on highlighting lin-
guistic inequalities between men and women (e.g. Second Wave-oriented
work; Burr 2012; Houdebine 2003; Pauwels 1998; Spender 1980), and later
sexist discourses (e.g. ird Wave work; Lazar 2014; Holmes 2006; Sunder-
land 2004). However, both Second and ird Wave feminism tend to take
274 ANN COADY
gender binaries as given, whether biologically or socially constructed. By
leaving the binary categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’ unquestioned, both of
these waves leave the actual system of gender intact. Queer linguistics (QL)
goes beyond feminist linguistic reform by questioning the very existence of
gender categories. In this sense, QL clashes with some feminist linguistic
reform, such as French féminisation, which promotes the visibility princi-
ple (policiers et policières) rather than neutralisation (police ocers),
thus reinforcing binary gender categories.
It is perhaps easier to describe Queer as what it is not, rather than what it
is. Queer is supposed to escape all attempts at denition (Motschenbacher
2010:6), and has been described as ‘a signier without a signied’ (Sau-
ssure’s terminology), or a ‘oating’ or ‘empty’ signier (Lévi-Strauss’s termi-
nology), i.e. the word Queer (the signier) is stable, but the concept it refers
to (the signied) is not, as it is only dened in relation to current norms, and
norms change. Because Queer challenges ‘whatever constitutes the normal,
the legitimate, the generally accepted’ (Sicurella 2016:81), as those norms
change over time, Queer relocates itself to retain its subversive force. It is,
by denition, indeterminate and elastic, precisely the qualities which give
it its political ecacy (Jagose 1996:1 cited in McConnell-Ginet 2002:138).
Studies on language and gender carried out from a Queer perspective
therefore challenge current gender and sexuality norms, which are pro-
duced in, and reinforced by, language, whether they are heteronormative
(promoting heterosexuality as the norm) or heteronormative (promoting
certain kinds of heterosexuality as the norm). In both of these cases the
hetero element (from the Greek ἕτερος meaning ‘the other of two’, ‘other’ or
‘dierent’; OED undated) highlights the binary foundation of all forms of
heteronormativity. Queer linguistics challenges how the language system
promotes heteronormativity through ‘the linguistic construction of essen-
tialist, binary gender categories’ (Motschenbacher 2014:250).
Using QL we can critique binary linguistic categories, highlighting how
they were constructed, based on social gender binaries, and examining
how they function as a normative mechanism. Markedness, which is an
essential concept in the sexist language debate, can also be unpacked to
reveal how certain terms have become marked or unmarked. e concepts
of binarity and markedness are of particular importance for the analysis of
sexist linguistic structures, which I discuss under Iconisation below.
Language ideology
Language ideology (LI) as a eld of study emerged from linguistic anthro-
pology in the 1970s with the work of Silverstein (1979), but reections on
the relationship between language and ideology can also be found earlier
THE ORIGIN OF SEXISM IN LANGUAGE 275
in the of work of Bakhtin and Voloshinov (Blommaert 2006). Although LI
emerged from linguistic anthropology, work on attitudes to language have
also been carried out in variationist sociolinguistics (Milroy and Milroy
2012) and applied linguistics (Cameron 1995). One of its main foci has
been on attitudes in contexts of language contact (Jae 1999), and language
standardisation (Johnson 2005), and as such has close ties with language
reform. LI has also been used to analyse the ideological drive behind his-
torical language change e.g. the disappearance of thou and thee in English,
which were gradually abandoned because they had come to index an unpop-
ular Quaker identity (Silverstein 1985:251). It is precisely the emphasis on
language use as a politically invested ideological construct that brings LI
and QL together. From an LI point of view, standardisation (including the
normalisation of the masculine as the generic form) should be seen as the
result of a discursive project, or ideological process (Woolard 1998:4).
Not only do ideologies of language serve to rationalise language use,
they can also ‘actively and concretely distort the linguistic structure it
represents’ (Silverstein quoted in Woolard 1998:12). One example that
Silverstein uses to illustrate this phenomenon is feminists’ ‘misanalysis’ of
generic he: ‘the diagnosis of the purported structural ailment [that generic
he is sexist] is really a process of unambiguous creation of – or infectious
innoculation with – the pragmatic disease’ (Silverstein 1985:254). In other
words, feminists have not understood the principles of structural gender
categories i.e. that he is part of a formal structural hierarchy of language
going from more inclusive to less inclusive e.g. masculine includes feminine
but not vice versa, animate includes personal but not vice versa (Silverstein
1985:225–6). He claims that feminists have failed to dierentiate between
the masculine’s notional (inclusive) sense, and its exclusive (male) sense.
I am sure that the metaphor of disease in this quote has not escaped the
reader’s attention. is rather elitist comment can be understood in terms
of what I have termed a ‘Tower of Babel’ ideology of language, in which lan-
guage is apparently on a constantly downward slope (Deutscher 2006:ch.
3). Silverstein adds that generic he is a ‘structurally dictated indexical usage’
(Silverstein 1985:256), but he does not indicate how these constraints came
about, i.e. the social and semiotic processes which resulted in masculine
being at the top of this formal structural hierarchy, something which this
article goes some way to explaining.
Iconisation
Iconisation is a dichotomising process whereby two groups of speakers are
created according to linguistic features that they share, or are perceived
to share. e linguistic feature becomes representative of one particu-
276 ANN COADY
lar group. In other words, it becomes an icon of them. As well as being
a dichotomising process, iconisation is also an essentialising process, in
which individuals are treated as belonging to homogenous social groups
and any intra group dierences are minimised, whereas inter group dier-
ences are highlighted.
In fact, the very existence of ‘a language’ is the result of iconisation.
For instance, before the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, Serbo-Croatian
was a single language with very minor dierences. After the breakup,
Serbo-Croatian fractured into four ‘dierent languages’: Serbian, Croatian,
Bosnian and Montenegrin, along ethnic and religious lines, rather than lin-
guistic, a division which tends to highlight dierences between these four
varieties, and make any similarities less visible. In fact, the ‘separate lan-
guages’ of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are more similar to
one another than British and American English, which are classed as two
varieties of the same language (omas 2002:314). is process of iconisa-
tion in the Balkans is currently having direct consequences on non-sexist
language reform: One reason for the rejection of feminist language reforms
in Serbia is that neighbouring Croatia has accepted them, and Serbia has
spent the better part of 25 years trying to create a separate national and
political identify for itself (Rajilic 2016). us, iconisation can also describe
perceived, rather than real dierences.
In order to analyse the emergence of sexism in language, I have reversed
the process of iconisation, that is, rather than groups being partitioned
because of (real or perceived) linguistic features, humans are partitioned on
the basis of sex/gender. Humans themselves underwent a process of iconi-
sation, and because of our binary conceptions of sex/gender, two groups
were formed. Women and men were (and still are) essentialised as homog-
enous groups, thus ignoring any variation in biological sex and / or social
gender. e fact that iconisation is an essentialising process is particularly
interesting in relation to QL, whose central aim is, ‘de-essentialisation – a
mechanism at the heart of Queer Linguistics’ (Motschenbacher and Stegu
2013:528). In other words, QL tries to reverse the process of iconisation in
order to highlight its damaging social eects. One eect of essentialisation
is the creation of binary categories.
Binarity
As a dichotomising and partitioning process, iconisation necessarily results
in a binary. Gender binarity is seen as a form of normativity, which forces
individuals to fall onto one side of the binary and marginalises those who
do not. In fact, grammatical gender can be seen as the linguistic reection
and reinforcement of binary social gender. For Queer linguists the reason
THE ORIGIN OF SEXISM IN LANGUAGE 277
that gender binarism exists, is to establish and stabilise a heteronorma-
tive system, in which men and women are supposed to be dierent from
one another, in which opposites attract (Motschenbacher 2014:250), and
inherent in which is a hierarchy between men and women. One example of
how a binary gender system can work as a normative mechanism is when
grammatical gender and referential gender clash.
Concerning animate nouns, in most Indo-European languages, a man
is usually referred to with a masculine noun and a woman with a femi-
nine noun. ere are a few exceptions like une vigie [a lookout], or une
sentinelle [a sentry] in French, which are grammatically feminine, lexically
neutral, but usually referentially male. Apart from these cases, when there
is a clash between grammatical and referential gender, it is often to insult
e.g. tapette, otte, pédale, tantouze and tarlouze [all meaning something
like fag, pansy, or poofter] are all grammatically feminine nouns in French
used to insult gay men. Studies in QL have found that insulting terms for
gay men (Coutant 2014 for French) or ‘feminine men’ (Motschenbacher
2010:75–7 for German2) are often grammatically feminine. However, this
trend is much weaker for women, for whom the terms tend to be grammat-
ically feminine, not masculine (e.g. KampesbeFEM [‘bulldyke’] in German.
Coutant found no grammatically masculine terms for lesbian women in her
corpus). is clearly shows the social hierarchy of man at the top reected
in grammatical gender with the masculine as more prestigious. Using the
grammatically masculine form to insult a man involves no extra wounding
potential because it is the most prestigious form, but using a grammatically
feminine form to downgrade him to the status of woman is possible, as that
is a step down on the grammatical hierarchy. Insults for lesbians tend to
be grammatically feminine, because on the grammatical hierarchy, there
is nothing lower than the feminine, apart from neuter, which has more of
a dehumanising eect than an insult to somebody’s gender or sexuality
(McConnell-Ginet 2014:23; Motschenbacher, personal communication,
27 July 2016).
Markedness
rough iconisation men became icons for humanity, and so were able
to represent the whole population. is is also known as ‘prototypicality’,
where one prototypical member of a group, comes to represent the rest of
the group. us, men were placed at the top of the social hierarchy, which
was then reected onto language. Terms such as man became inclusive or
unmarked terms, able to refer to the whole of humanity.
Queer linguistics sees markedness as a tool for establishing norma-
tive ideologies (Motschenbacher 2010:94–6), or as a means of promoting
278 ANN COADY
certain values (Klinkenberg 2006:21). In other words, the grammar system
is a means of reinforcing (or challenging) dominant social values:
e pattern in formal linguistics has been to interpret marked forms in relation
to their unmarked counterparts much in the way that alternative expressions of
gender and sexuality have traditionally been ideologically viewed in relation to
their statistically more common heteronormative counterparts – precisely the
ideology that queer theory seeks to challenge, not to uphold. (Barrett 2014:215)
In French, the masculine is often used as the unmarked term. However,
there has been much debate in recent years over this, especially when
referring to a specic woman. In the Introduction, I referred to Julien
Aubert, who was ned for addressing Sandrine Mazetier in the masculine,
and the resulting media debate about whether or not the male politician
was correct or not. e Académie française, the ocial French language
authority (but see Viennot, Candea, Chevalier, Duverger, and Houdebine
2016 for a critique of the institution) came to his defence, claiming that:
Si, en eet, le français connaît deux genres, appelés masculin et féminin, il
serait plus juste de les nommer genre marqué et genre non marqué. Seul le
genre masculin, non marqué, peut représenter aussi bien les éléments mascu-
lins que féminins. (Académie française 2014)
[If, indeed, French has two genders, called masculine and feminine, it would be
more accurate to call them the marked gender and the unmarked gender. Only
the masculine, the unmarked gender, can represent masculine as well as femi-
nine elements.]
Nevertheless, the concept of markedness is controversial in linguistics,
and there is no general agreement on which criteria are necessary to show
markedness, whether some are more important than others, what to do
if the criteria give conicting results, or how they interrelate (Waugh
and Laord 2000:276). ere are several dierent types of markedness,
for instance, semantic, distributional, contextual, conceptual, and formal
markedness, and the masculine is not always the unmarked term in a gen-
dered pair. ere are many examples where the feminine is unmarked, for
example, the feminine vache [cow] is the semantically unmarked term,
used to refer to cattle in general, not the masculine boeuf [bull]. Other
feminine semantically unmarked terms include poule [hen] compared to
poulet [cock/rooster], oie [goose] compared to jars [gander]:
e main reason for this would seem to be that males of the species are nor-
mally kept in smaller numbers by farmers than females, and purely for breed-
ing: the main stock is female, and this is treated […] as the unmarked norm.
(Lyons 1977:308)
THE ORIGIN OF SEXISM IN LANGUAGE 279
Although the above examples refer to animals, it serves to highlight that the
unmarked form represents the socially more valued form, or simply the more
frequently encountered form, whether it is masculine or feminine. In fact,
Haspelmath (2006) argues that the term ‘markedness’ should be replaced
with other, more precise terms. In the case of the masculine being the de
facto unmarked form, he suggests using standard semantic concepts like
hyponymy (e.g. man to refer to males only) and polysemy (e.g. man having
two dierent meanings – an inclusive and an exclusive one) (Haspelmath
2006:28). is would put the emphasis on the function that the word fulls
rather than suggesting that that is has an innate unmarked value.
Etymologically speaking, man in English, and homme in French, were
originally generic terms to refer humans in general. Mann (or man) in Old
English meant human, for example wifmann literally meant female (wif)
human (mann). A man was referred to as a wermann,3 literally a male (wer)
human (mann) before gradually narrowing down to refer only to men
(Curzan 2003:62; Baron 1986:138). is process of semantic restriction
can also be seen in French: homme comes from the Latin homo, which also
meant human, as in the term homo sapiens (vir was used to refer to a man
and mulier referred to a woman). In fact, this narrowing down from human
to man seems to be a widespread phenomenon in many dierent languages
(Doleschal 2015:1161). Haspelmath explains the processes involved in how
some terms become unmarked and other marked:
Consider, as an example, the word America. Originally this referred to the
entire continent in the western hemisphere that Europeans had become aware
of after 1492. But English speakers of course used America primarily for the
part of the continent that was settled from England, and nowadays it has
become restricted to the United States of America. It is no longer possible to
cancel this enriched meaning in English (*I’m from America, more specically
from South America). e enriched meaning has become conventionalized.
(Haspelmath 2006:51)
Rather than for any linguistic reason, markedness and genericity are based
on the relative importance and power of one group over another. It is no
accident that the USA, the most powerful country on the American con-
tinent, has appropriated the term for itself. Had Canada been the more
inuential country, we would probably be calling it ‘America’ today. e
more powerful a group, the more frequently we talk about them. e more
frequent a term is, the more likely it is to be shortened, which is simply due
to linguistic economy. e less powerful the group is, the less frequently
they will be talked about, and the less likely it is that the term referring
to them will be shortened. Markedness is essentially about distinguish-
280 ANN COADY
ing what is seen as normal (unmarked), from what is abnormal (marked)
(Barrett 2014:215).
It seems as though man and homme became the unmarked terms
because men were, quite simply, talked about more often than women,
because they were the more powerful, thus socially valued group. For most
people Man no longer refers to all humans, but only to male humans. Psy-
cholinguistic studies tend to show that in the majority of cases, masculine
nouns are understood to refer to men, rather than to both women and men
(see Brauer and Landry 2008; Stahlberg, Sczesny and Braun 2001; Gastil
1990). Centuries ago, it did describe all humans, but since at least 1000
it has been used to refer exclusively to adult males (Curzan 2003:167).
ose against non-sexist language reform often refer to the etymology of
man and homme as evidence of their current generic value, but this is a
rather simplistic idea, which Curzan describes as ‘etymological fallacies’, in
other words:
that words ‘mean’ – in some fundamental way – what they used to mean or
originally meant, and all subsequent semantic changes are corruptions or tem-
porary ‘misunderstandings’ of the ‘correct meaning’. Words fundamentally
mean what speakers believe that words mean and what they use words to mean.
(Curzan 2003:175)
Silverstein (1979:193) also mentions that looking for a word’s ‘true’ or
central meaning in its etymological origins is a common linguistic ideology,
not unlike the Tower of Babel, in which speakers look back to an imaginary
‘Golden Age of perfection’ in language (Deutscher 2006:80). Arguing that
because man referred to all humans almost 1000 years ago, it still does
today, is about as logical as arguing that because girl used to mean ‘a child
of any sex’, it still does today (Curzan 2003:133).
Fractal recursivity
Fractal recursivity is a term borrowed from geometry, which refers to two
interrelated phenomena. A fractal is a pattern which (a) is the same across
dierent scales (i.e. it looks the same whether we zoom in or out), and (b)
is driven by recursion (repetition) of itself. Fractals can also be found in
nature (e.g. sunowers, Romanesco broccoli, crystals in snowakes) and
art (e.g. Jackson Pollock, the Sierpinski triangle).
Within Irvine and Gal’s framework, fractal recursivity describes how the
dichotomies created from iconisation are reected onto some other level
(e.g. gender, sexuality, ethnicity, social class…) and repeated. us, in its
original format, fractal recursivity projects oppositions, which are created
at a linguistic level, onto other semiotic tiers, like gender and sexuality.
THE ORIGIN OF SEXISM IN LANGUAGE 281
One example of fractal recursivity is the eect that dierent pronun-
ciations of [s] can have on gender and sexuality perception. Men tend to
produce a lower frequency ([s-]) than women, who tend to produce a higher,
‘crispier’ ([s+]). However, this seems to be socially conditioned rather than
biological (Hazenberg 2016:274). Obviously there is a considerable amount
of variation among men and women – some men produce high frequency
[s]’s, and some women produce low frequency [s]’s. What is interesting
here is that the pronunciation of [s] is projected onto another semiotic tier,
in this case male sexuality. A higher frequency [s] pronunciation becomes
an iconic marker of gay men, and indexes a whole host of traits related to
stereotypical male homosexuality, such as eeminate behaviour. In addi-
tion, this phenomenon is not restricted to English, and has been noted
in other languages (see Welker 2016 for Spanish; and Pharao, Maegaard,
Møller and Kristiansen 2014 for Danish).
In a study of perceptual bias of the pronunciation of [s] in English (Mun-
son and Zimmerman 2006), male participants were perceived as gay if they
used a high-frequency [s], whatever their actual sexuality. Obviously not all
gay men produce [s+], and not all straight men produce lower-frequency
[s-], but iconisation tends to blur any inter-group similarities. Iconisation
‘describes how linguistic phenomena are portrayed as if they owed ‘natu-
rally’ from a social group’s biological or cultural essence’ (Milani 2010:120).
In this example, a certain pronunciation of [s] is projected onto male sexu-
ality, and portrayed as a result of gay men’s ‘naturally’ eeminate nature.
is creates a ‘natural’ opposition between gay and straight men, with a
clear social hierarchy. is higher-frequency pronunciation of [s] does not
seem to be the result of gay men’s biological make-up,4 and the notion of
‘cultural essence’ is highly problematic. It seems more likely that the pro-
nunciation of [s] by gay men is used as an identity marker under certain
circumstances, when they want to make their gay identity apparent.
As with iconisation, I have reversed the process of fractal recursivity
for my analysis of sexist language. It is not the linguistic feature, which
is projected onto gender, but gender that is projected onto the language.
Probably the most powerful example of fractal recursivity is the origin of
the feminine grammatical gender itself, which has never been denitively
proven.
Historical linguists generally concur that there were two noun classes
in Indo-European – animate and inanimate (Elmiger 2008:51). However,
the reasons as to how these two categories came about have been under
discussion for over a century (Luraghi 2011:436). It seems that at a rela-
tively recent point, the feminine originated as an oshoot of the animate
category. As to why a third gender (the feminine) should emerge in the rst
282 ANN COADY
place, Luraghi claims that, ‘the only possible motivation for a new gender
which expands on an animacy-based three-gender system is sex’ (Luraghi
2011:448). French feminist linguist, Claire Michard (1996:44) also supports
this perspective, and argues that the feminine grammatical gender emerged
because the female sex was already a socially marked sex. Marking women
in this way allowed men to appropriate the notion of ‘unmarked human’,
while relegating women to the status of ‘marked human’. is means that
the feminine was, from its very origin, a restricted gender (because it could
only refer to females and not humans in general). Luraghi concurs on this
point. She suggests that even before the emergence of the new feminine
gender in Indo-European, words relating to females were already being lin-
guistically marked with suxes:
if one looks at Anatolian,5 where a feminine grammatical gender is not avail-
able, one nds a number of nouns that refer to human females and derive from
masculine nouns with the addition of the sux -(š)šara-, as in ḫaššuššaraš
‘queen’, from ḫaššuš ‘king’ or išḫaššaraš ‘lady’, from išḫaš ‘lord’ (Honer and
Melchert 2008). (Luraghi 2009a:19)
A second example of my modied version of fractal recursivity is social
gender being projected onto inanimate nouns. As previously mentioned,
historical linguists do not really know why grammatical gender for inani-
mate nouns emerged, and why, for example, a bridge should be masculine
in French (un pont) but feminine in German (Die Brücke) (for how gram-
matical gender aects how speakers think about the objects concerned, see
Boroditsky, Schmidt and Phillips 2003; Sera et al. 2002). Grammatical gen-
der for inanimate nouns has often been described as semantically arbitrary,
with no basis in human physiology or sexual behaviour. However, it is not
entirely semantically arbitrary. Scholars have argued that all gender systems
are at least partially semantic (Corbett 1991:8; Violi 1987:15). ere are cer-
tain classes of nouns which can be categorised according to their semantic
value; for example, names of trees, days of the week, months and seasons,
cheeses, wines, metals and minerals are usually masculine in French; names
of cars and academic subjects are usually feminine. is said, for the majority
of inanimate nouns, grammatical gender has no semantic basis whatsoever,
and is based on morphology and phonology (Corbett 1991:61).
One important result of this leakage between grammatical and social
gender (Romaine 1999:63–90; Violi 1987) is the current rule of the gender
agreement in French. Codication of the language ourished in the six-
teenth century, when hierarchies were established between nouns and their
relative importance. Although there is no grammatical agreement between
nouns and their qualiers in English, grammarians recommended putting
THE ORIGIN OF SEXISM IN LANGUAGE 283
nouns in order of importance, e.g. king and queen (not queen and king),
father and mother (not mother and father): ‘e concept of worthiness is
[…] a reection of a natural order that places man at the head of creation,
with woman in a subordinate, subservient, and frequently invisible place’
(Baron 1986:98). e same concept of worthiness can be found in French
grammar, as well as word order e.g. un homme et cinq milliards de
femmes sont morts [one man and ve billion women died]. e one
man will generally come before the ve billion women, and the past parti-
ciple morts is in the masculine. However sexist this may be, we can clearly
see some kind of logic in it. What is less logical is the idea that bonnet [hat]
is more worthy than écharpe [scarf]. Once bonnet has been identied as a
masculine noun and écharpe as feminine, the ‘logic’ becomes clearer. us,
in the sentence le bonnet et l’écharpe sont verts [the hat and the
scarf are green], verts is in the masculine. e masculine noun bonnet is
considered more worthy than the feminine écharpe by virtue of its gram-
matical gender (attributed for morphological reasons), even though both
are inanimate objects, with no obvious masculine or feminine qualities.
Social gender, and its hierarchy, was reected onto inanimate objects.
Erasure
As opposed to iconisation and fractal recursivity, which I slightly modied,
I am able to use erasure in its original format.
Erasure is the process in which ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic eld,
renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible.
Facts are inconsistent with the ideological scheme either go unnoticed or get
explained away. […] Because a linguistic ideology is a totalizing vision, elements
that do not t its interpretative structure – that cannot be seen to t – must be
either ignored or transformed. (Irvine and Gal 2000:38)
ere are numerous examples of erasure regarding feminist linguistics
(Baudino 2001; Viennot 2014), a process whereby any evidence that contra-
dicts the naturalness of one side of the argument is ignored, not recorded,
not discussed, and then simply fades away into the shadows of forgotten
history. Previously, I discussed how the processes of iconisation and fractal
recursivity resulted in the masculine becoming the generic form. In this
part I will demonstrate how counter discourses to the masculine generic
were erased from the public arena.
When Vulgar Latin6 transitioned into French, the neuter gender in Latin
was absorbed by the masculine in French. is phenomenon is part of the
reason that some see the masculine as more inclusive, and therefore able
to full a generic role:
284 ANN COADY
L’une des contraintes propres à la langue française est qu’elle n’a que deux
genres: pour désigner les qualités communes aux deux sexes, il a donc fallu
qu’à l’un des deux genres soit conférée une valeur générique an qu’il puisse
neutraliser la diérence entre les sexes. L’héritage latin a opté pour le masculin.
(Académie française 2014)
[One of the constraints particular to the French language is that it only has two
genders: in order to designate the qualities that are common to both sexes, one
of the two genders had to be attributed a generic value so that it was able to
neutralise the dierence between the sexes. Because of our Latin heritage, the
masculine was chosen.]
Khaznadar, on the other hand, vehemently disagrees claiming that, ‘[d]ire
que le masculin français est “héritier du neutre latin” est une contrevérité’
[‘to say that the French masculine is the “heir of the neuter in Latin” is
an untruth’] (Khaznadar 2007:33). In fact, the Académie française ignores
several arguments that contradict their position. ere are four main issues
that need to be addressed with regard to the Latin neuter: (i) many neuter
nouns became feminine; (ii) the etymology of neuter is ambiguous; (iii)
most neuter nouns were inanimate; and (iv) neuter does not necessarily
mean generic.
Firstly, although the masculine did absorb most neuter nouns in Latin,
over a third became feminine nouns in Old French (Polinksy and van
Everbroeck 2003:376–8) e.g. mare [sea] → mer , gaudia
[joys, delights] → joie , and folia [leaves] → feuille (Solodow
2010:230). is can be explained by the fact that gaudium and
folium were more widely used in their plural forms gaudia and
folia in Vulgar Latin, which, because they ended in -a, were mistaken
for the feminine singular, and so became feminine in French.7
Secondly, the etymology of neuter does not necessarily support the
claim that it has a generic value. Neuter (ne- + -uter) literally means ‘not
either’ (Kennedy 1906:14). It could therefore be argued that if neuter means
neither masculine nor feminine, that it excludes rather than includes both
of these noun classes, dees logic and is ‘littéralement un non-sens’ [liter-
ally nonsense] (Khaznadar 2006). is argument is supported by studies
of the rst Latin grammars, one of which, De lingua latina by M. Teren-
tius Varro (116–27 ), translates the Greek σκεύη [things] (Corbeill
2008:80) as neutrum [neuter] in Latin (Burr 2012:31). Other Latin works
also conrm this perspective: in his Institutiones grammaticae, Priscianus
(fth century ) wrote that the communis (common gender) referred to
both males and females, as opposed to the neuter, which signied neither
male nor female (Burr 2012:31).
THE ORIGIN OF SEXISM IN LANGUAGE 285
irdly, the vast majority of neuter nouns in Latin, as well as Indo-
European (Luraghi 2011:440), had inanimate referents (Khaznadar 2007:33),
apart from a few exceptions such as vulgus [the common people] (Kennedy
1906:222) or scortum and prostibulum [prostitute] (Pitavy 2014:175). It
seems very unlikely that the handful of animate neuter nouns which became
masculine, transmitted their ‘unmarked’ quality to the thousands of exist-
ing masculine nouns, thus giving these masculine nouns a kind of double
identity – marked when used with a male referent, and unmarked when
employed in a non-specic context. It could also be argued that the absorp-
tion of the neuter by the masculine simply increased the size of the mas-
culine noun class, rather than modifying the value or quality of the nouns
already there. e neuter was as marked as any other gender (in that it had
specic endings that coded it as neuter), and it was only ‘neutral’ in that it
referred to inanimate entities.
Finally, the underlying problem here is seems to be a conation of the
terms neuter and generic, which are not synonymous. Neuter refers to a
specic noun class, which in Latin was composed almost entirely of inani-
mate nouns e.g. templum [temple], mare [sea], carmen [song / poem].
Generic, or hyponym, on the other hand, refers to the capacity of a noun to
refer to a whole class or group of things e.g. fruit is a generic term referring
to bananas, apples, oranges, kiwis etc. Neuter nouns do not therefore neces-
sarily have a generic value. In fact, any noun is capable of fullling the role of
generic depending on the context, for instance in the pair fruit-banana, fruit
is the generic term. In the pair banana-ensete (ensete is a variety of banana),
banana is the generic form. However, according to traditional grammar, the
masculine has an inherent generic value when referring to animate nouns
thanks in great part, to its absorption of two thirds of Latin neuter nouns,
which were not necessarily generic, and which referred to inanimate objects
for the great majority.
Using the Latin heritage of French mobilises a discourse of tradition.
Woollard notes:
representations of the history of languages often function as Malinowskian
charter myths,8 projecting from the present to an originary past a legitimation
of contemporary power relations and interested positions. (Or, we might prefer
to say, projecting from the past a legitimating selection of one from among con-
tending centers of power in the present). (Woolard 2004:58)
In other words, the story-tellers of history cherry-pick the elements which
support their arguments, while erasing those that do not. Khaznadar (2006)
also noticed that the choice of the Latin heritage argument by the Acadé-
mie française was not anodyne: ‘Inscrire dans le débat les origines latines
286 ANN COADY
du français impose le respect aux non-initiés, les impressionne peut-être’
[incorporating the Latin origins of French into the debate imposes respect
from the non-initiated, perhaps intimidating them]. Which discourses
get promoted, and which are erased is not up to just anyone. In order to
promote a particular discourse, one needs to be in a position of linguistic
authority, hence the power of language bodies like the Académie française.
Early on, I briey mentioned Silverstein,9 who claimed that generic he is
a ‘structurally dictated indexical usage’ (Silverstein 1985:256). Implying that
inclusive masculine is simply a fact of grammar fails to take into account the
fact that languages do not evolve in a social and cultural vacuum (Curzan
2003:184). A language structure does not just build itself, speakers shape
it over centuries, and with powerful speakers having more inuence than
powerless speakers. Cameron labels this tactic ‘mystication’: ‘to deny that
authority could be at work (by saying, for instance, that such and such a
usage is ‘just a fact about the grammar of x’) is a mystication’ (Cameron
1995:6). ere is always somebody behind language change; the question
is how visible they are.
Discussion
Prior work on sexism in language has identied the causes of sexism in
language as being rooted in an androcentric view of the world (Cameron
1995:134; McConnell-Ginet 1984:124), but not the social mechanisms
involved in how it is historically produced and reproduced. is article
argues that the processes of iconisation, fractal recursivity, and erasure
provide a unifying theory to explain the social and semiotic mechanisms
involved in sexist grammar and semantics. Iconisation results in the
partitioning of humans into two binary groups based on gender. Men
became the unmarked icon of the whole of humanity. is partition-
ing, and resulting hierarchy, was then projected onto language through
the process of fractal recursivity, and the masculine gender became the
generic form. Finally through erasure, certain discourses were able to
become dominant, while others were erased from the public arena. It is
through these processes that current grammatical norms such as le bon-
net et l’é char pe sont verts [the hat and the scarf are green] can be
explained. ey are norms, which certain people have been in a position
to implement over the centuries. e generic status of the masculine is ‘an
integral part of a doctrine which […] was consciously constructed over the
centuries and [that] the natural order it proposes concurs with the idea
that men are “worthier” than women’ (Burr 2012:30). An understanding
of not just why sexism in language exists, but how it exists allows us to
deconstruct arguments against feminist linguistic reforms more easily.
THE ORIGIN OF SEXISM IN LANGUAGE 287
It allows us to argue that institutions such as the Académie française are
not just sexist, but that their arguments are linguistically unsound (also
see Viennot et al. 2016).
In the Introduction, I said that QL opens up exciting new ways to ap-
proach sexism in language. From a poststructuralist perspective, grammar
is simply the discursive sedimentation of the repetition of certain catego-
ries (Motschenbacher 2010:87). is allows us to fuse elements of Second
Wave analyses of grammar as relatively stable, with a poststructuralist
approach that sees language as performative, and thus malleable. e mas-
culine generic is the discursive sedimentation of ideologies of gender (the
superiority of males) and ideologies of language (meaning as xed). If sexist
ideologies have changed immensely in the West since the mid-twentieth
century, there is still a high level of resistance to feminist linguistic inter-
ventions in France, especially with regard to the masculine generic. is
article highlights the how the unmarked quality of the masculine is simply
the result of semantic restriction, and shows how grammatical gender can
act as a normative mechanism for gender and sexuality. Because Queer
criticises binaries, it puts the visibility principle of feminist linguistic plan-
ning, used for most Romance languages, into question. In France, terms for
women have been promoted as part of the féminisation project, but this
has resulted in ‘categorical homeostasis’ (Silverstein 1985:252), meaning
that the same binary system is still in place. Queer linguistics addresses
the very existence of gender and its binary nature. In this way, rather than
simply adding feminine forms to balance masculine ones, we can question
why a binary grammatical system exists in the rst place, which has im-
portant repercussions on the direction of future feminist language policy.
Recent work in QL has identied various solutions to sexist linguistic
structures. For instance, using one orthographic word with punctuation
marks separating the word into either feminine or masculine (e.g. étudi-
ants + étudiantes = étudiant-e-s [student-s]). ey are at the same
time both masculine and feminine, and neither masculine nor feminine.
However, abbreviated splitting (étudiant-e-s), and full splitting (étudiants-
et étudiantes) still separate masculine and feminine, and so ‘can be
read iconically as a sign of female-male incompatibility’ (Motschenbacher
2014:225). Slightly more radical is the blending of the feminine and mascu-
line forms to create a neutral one: professionnels + professionnelles =
professionèles [professionals] (Labrosse 2002:100), and il [he] + elle
[she] = ille [s/he / singular they] (Abbou 2011:63) (also see Elmiger 2015
for a good overview of neutralisation techniques in French). Abbreviated
splitting and full splitting are becoming more and more commonplace in
French. However, blending is still a very marginal practice.
288 ANN COADY
A Queer perspective on gendered linguistic forms needs to be taken
into account before any further language reforms are carried out. Further-
more, in order for non-sexist language reforms to work, we need to know
why people reject or accept change. Analysing the origin of the problem
allows us to better evaluate the current linguistic situation, and people’s
attitudes to it. In fact, many arguments that people mobilise today for or
against change are based on language ideologies that have been constructed
through the processes of iconisation, fractal recursivity, and erasure, and
which are reinforced by language gatekeepers whose authority and ideo-
logical bias is often hidden.
About the author
Ann Coady is a PhD student at Sheeld Hallam University. Her thesis is a compara-
tive study of feminist linguistic reforms in French and English, specically the ideolo-
gies of language that emerge in debates about politically motivated language change.
Her other research interests include corpus linguistics, CDA, historical linguistics,
Queer linguistics and language planning. Her publications include ‘La Construction
socio-discursive du masculine générique: discours et contre-discours‘ in Bailly et
al. (eds), Pratiques et langages du genre et du sexe: déconstruire l’idéologie sexiste du
binarisme (2016), and ‘Mademoiselle va-t-il perdurer “malgré les oukases”?’ in Cahiers
de Linguistique (2014).
Notes
1 e UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) is the major right-wing party in
France. In 2015 it changed its name to Les Républicains. e PS (Parti Socialiste) is
the major left-wing party in France.
2 Although Motschenbacher asked his participants for terms denoting ‘masculine
women’ and ‘feminine men’, not specically lesbian women or gay men, many of the
terms elicited were insults for gays and lesbians.
3 Werewolf (literally man + wolf) is the only surviving remnant of the term wer [man
i.e. male] in Modern English (Baron 1986:139).
4 Munson posits that genetic factors may play some role in the more frequent ‘lisp’
pronunciation that he found in a study on boys with gender ‘dysphoria’ (Munson,
Crocker, Pierrehumbert, Owen-Anderson and Zucker 2015), although he does not
go into detail as to exactly what these genetic dierences may be.
5 Anatolian refers to a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken
in Asia Minor. e best known is Hittite, which had a noun-class system based on
an animate/inanimate distinction, rather than a masculine-feminine distinction. It
is thought that the masculine-feminine gender divide happened in late PIE, after
Anatolian had spilt o from that branch (Beekes 2011). is suggests that gram-
matical gender originated as a reection of social gender. I am not suggesting that
language does not inuence society, but in this case social gender seems to be the
most logical explanation for the origin of grammatical gender.
6 Vulgar Latin refers to the forms of Latin spoken by the common people, as opposed
to written Classical Latin.
THE ORIGIN OF SEXISM IN LANGUAGE 289
7 e -a ending of the neuter plural goes all the way back to Indo-European. Many
collective nouns were neuter, and so took the ending -a, a sux also shared by the
feminine. For a long time, linguists assumed that there was a semantic link between
collectives and the feminine, but recently this has been discounted. It seems as
though the neuter plural and the feminine were two separate morphological devel-
opments (Luraghi 2009a).
8 Anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski advocated that myths tended to advance the
agendas of people in power.
9 Incidentally, Silverstein was part of the group who wrote the infamous ‘pronoun
envy’ letter to the Harvard Crimson in 1971 (Silverstein 1971).
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