Dear Directorate: Why the feminization of language is inevitable
In the first series of "Mad Men" Christina Hendrix's heroine tells Peggy, a new employee, "He wants to be a secretary, but she can’t make it a secretary." At the bottom of the video, the subtitles echo: "He may pretend that he needs a secretary, but in fact he needs a cross between a mother and a waitress." In English, the word secretary has no gender, it is a gender neutral word. It can be translated into Russian as a "secretary", and as a "secretary".
We can say that Peggy works as a secretary, but if she is promoted, she will become a director. The word "director" in our language is used much less frequently. For example, in the National Corpus of the Russian language there are 5,811 texts with the word "director", and only 115 are fifty times smaller! - with its feminine form. In linguistics, the appearance of the female form of the word is called the feminization of language. But why do we need these forms at all? You can explain: "Today I went to the doctor-woman" or "My boss is a woman."
In everyday life, we rarely pay attention to the language - to which words we choose and how we use them. A language, in fact, not only reflects and even forms our attitude to the world, but also in some way this world changes. What words we choose and which words in general exist in our language, not only describes the reality here and now, but also determines what it will be next.
In the modern Russian language with the words of the feminine gender, the situation is interesting: it is not strange for us to say “cleaner” instead of “cleaner”, and even vice versa - “cleaner Valentina Petrovna” sounds wrong and unusual. But if this mythical Valentina Petrovna does not want to work as a cleaner, she can become, for example, a deputy or a director. Language reflects the vertical and horizontal division that exists in our society. Horizontal - that is, "female" words exist in certain areas specifically reserved for women: there is an actress, a singer, a doorman, a secretary. But - the director, engineer, deputy. Forms of the feminine gender, even if they exist for socially important and privileged positions, have a negative connotation (for example, “doctor's”), but more often they simply do not exist. Vertical separation - that is, a woman can reach a certain level of authority, but not one step further. We can be assistants and lab technicians, but we become professors and laureates as soon as we climb the career ladder.
Even in cases where the feminine forms exist, they are commonly used and familiar, we often use the masculine: my name is Maria, and I am a journalist. In the plural, if the group is not entirely composed of women (and even then), the masculine is also used. The professor, referring to the course, will say "students", even if 90% of the students are girls. It would seem that in this terrible. But because of this, it turns out that women become invisible. We already live in the male world: women receive less, less often occupy leadership positions, women are stereotyped or not represented at all in popular culture.
Suppose there is a Behdel test for films, which was originally an irony over the fact that there are very few strong heroines in the cinema and that there is no representation of women’s culture outside relationships with men. There is no such test for the language: engineers, managers and journalists work, deputies in the State Duma pass laws, in Germany - the chancellor, in Norway - the minister of defense. The cleaners wash the floors, the singers perform, hysterics arrange tantrums.
An experiment was made at the Higher Anthropological School in Chisinau: the participants were asked to write a text on the proposed situation. The task was formulated in English, the characters - vegeterians and smokers - were described without reference to gender. In their text, the participants themselves chose what sex their heroes would be. This experiment showed that in a situation where people have to choose the right shape themselves, people choose men more often, and when choosing a heroine they associate their stories with gender stereotypes: for example, one of the participants described vegetarian girls, because "there are no vegetarian men, who would just of their own accord become vegetarians: they were 100% pressured by women. " According to a Polish study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, people tend to evaluate below the characters described using the female form of the name of the profession. According to scientists, the reasons for this are that such forms are unusual, but the more often they are used, the more familiar and more neutral we will perceive them.
"Female" words exist in specially designated areas for women: actress, singer, waiter, secretary
But what can we do about it? There are rules, we cannot change them, as we like, and invent our own words! No, we can. For some reason we think that the rules of the language, Russian and any other, are akin to the commandments carved on the stone. In fact, the rules are secondary to language. Young children do not learn the rules when they learn to speak: a native speaker has an intuitive sense of the language, and linguistics believes that this feeling cannot fail - it can only go against the literary norm. A native speaker cannot speak incorrectly. The rules fix how we speak, and only then we say how it is fixed. This is a looped process, but the primary "entry point" is always a native speaker. This is what we bring to the language "cupcakes" and "coldbrew", we say this "should" instead of "need" and we decide whether to say "scientist" instead of "woman-scientist".
Russian philologist Hasan Huseynov wrote in 2012 in the book “Zero on the tip of the language. A brief guide to Russian discourse”: “What prevents people from calmly writing and speaking the poetess, the chairwoman, or, say, the deputy”? we live in eternity, not in history. It is in eternity that all words stand in their place. And the historical surf still changes the configuration of the coastline, and sometimes quantitative changes do lead to qualitative changes. " In French and German, feminists at the beginning of the 20th century began to actively use forms of the feminine gender. It is now accepted to use not the plural masculine "students", but "students and students", and the female word is always in the first place. In English, due to the syntax, now more and more people use gender neutral forms: "actor" and for men and women, "police officer" instead of "policeman" and "policewoman".
The main thing to do in order to adapt the Russian language to women is to rely on your intuition. There are some feminist and ideas adopted in the scientific community on this subject: in narrow circles they use the words "author" and "director", and in the plural, by analogy with French and German, they write "researchers and researchers" or simply through a slash: "user"
Activism is always something big and terrible: it seems to us that in order to change the world, it is necessary to spend a huge amount of time and resources and almost put a life on it. But in general, such small, imperceptible, seemingly things - to say "boss" instead of "boss" or "scientist" instead of "scientist" - also influence something. In the end, the native speaker can not speak wrong.