The Russian Language: Gendered Nouns and Social Inequality

The topic of my two papers in our Linguistics class was Russian, and in the second paper I delved into gendered nouns, and the possible social inequalities that occur because of them. 

To give a basic overview, Russian is spoken by 137,000,000 people within the Russian Federation, with 201,373,900 speakers worldwide, with it generally being a primary or secondary language for said speakers (Lewis, Simons, and Fennig 2016). Russian was based on the Moscow dialect, and the three main dialects in use today are the dialect in the North, the dialect in the South, and the Central dialect (Ager 2016). The written language is based on a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet, with 32 letters, or 33 if the character for a silent sign is used, and uses six cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental, and Locative (Encyclopedia Britannica 2016). 

To delve deeper into what my second paper was about, we have to look at the gendered noun system that is present in Russian. There are three genders that are applied to nouns in Russian, those genders being masculine, feminine, and neuter (Rodina, 2012), and there are also three main declensions. The first consists of feminine nouns, the second of neuter and masculine, and the third of feminine (Garnham, 2015). The nouns will either be inanimate, which makes the gender assigned to them arbitrary, or animate, in which case they will generally be given a masculine or feminine gender, perhaps signifying a lack of gender neutral pronouns in Russian society (Garnham, 2015). 

The main focus of my second paper was the inequality that could be correlated to gendered nouns. In some cases occupations were unnecessarily gendered in a masculine form when a neuter noun would have worked just as well (Women and Language, 1999). In addition to this, some nouns that were given masculine nouns seemed to have been given that specific gender to try and keep women out of the upper reaches of power through defining women more in private spheres (Women and Language, 1999). There have also been studies done that show broad stereotypes throughout various gendered languages, such as a ‘secretary’ always being feminine, and thus seen as an appropriate job for a women (Garnham, 2015). While this could be coincidental, as correlation does not imply causation, the correlation between gendered nouns and social inequality is fairly strong, though hopefully as time goes on, the inequality will lessen or even cease.

Sources:

Ager, S. (2016). Russian. In Omniglot. Retrieved from: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/russian.htm

Garnham, A., & Yakovlev, Y. (2015). The Interaction of Morphological and Stereotypical Gender Information in Russian. Frontiers in Psychology. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=HRCA&sw=w&u=wylrc_uwyoming&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA448817024&sid=summon&asid=4cfb4ddc6f072417ce06d7ed2cf6616b

Lewis, M. P., Simons, F. G., Fennig, D. C. (2016). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Nineteenth edition. Retrieved from: http://www.ethnologue.com.

RODINA, Y., & WESTERGAARD, M. (2012). A cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical gender in russian. Journal of Child Language, 39(5), 1077-106. Retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000911000419

Russian Language. (n.d.) In Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Retrieved From: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Russian-language

Sex, Gender, and the Status of Women in the Russian Language. (1999). Women and Language, 22(2), 58. Retrieved from: http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=wylrc_uwyoming&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA59877462&sid=summon&asid=430153d30345907cb1896b1e3a8cd7e9