Pronouns: What are they?
It sounds a bit obvious, but it’s really common to refer to one thing in many different ways. For example, I live with a stinky gremlin, God’s perfect baby angel, the world’s sneakiest dinner thief, and Steve—all of whom are my cat.
If I get tired of coming up with creative epithets for my cat, I can use a pronoun to talk about him instead. Pronouns are words like I, hers, it, them, we, y’all, and that, and I can use them to replace anything I’m talking about as long as the pronoun agrees with a small number of that thing’s basic properties. These properties include number, which is whether there’s one (I, you) or more than one thing (we, y’all); person, which is whether we’re talking about me (first person), you (second person), or someone else (third person); and gender, which is what the rest of this blogpost is about.
When is gender grammatical?
When it comes to language, two kinds of gender matter: grammatical gender and semantic gender.
Grammatical gender is something that some languages have and others don’t. In languages with grammatical gender, all nouns are divided into two or more classes. For example, German has three noun classes (feminine, masculine, and neuter), casual Dutch has two (common and neuter), and English has none. In languages with these classes, the class (aka, gender) of a word determines how it behaves grammatically. For example, in German ‘cat’ belongs to the feminine class, so a generic cat is described with adjectives like nette (‘nice’) and stinkende (‘stinky’) rather than netter or stinkender, which are for masculine nouns.
This kind of gender generally has little to do with the meaning of words. Nothing about the meaning of ‘cat’ makes it better suited to be a feminine word rather than a masculine word.
In contrast, semantic gender plays a role in every language because it concerns how the meanings of certain words are culturally gendered. My cat Steve is a fancy little fisherman and not a distinguished stateswoman, so in English I refer to him using pronouns like he, him, and his. Similarly, I also use masculine pronouns to talk about my violin, Tom. There are many conventions around how someone names their instrument, and for me, those conventions led to the masculine name Tom.
In German, the word for violin is feminine (Geige), and violins are talked about using feminine pronouns like sie and ihr because those words agree with the grammatical gender of Geige. Even though I personally use masculine pronouns to talk about my violin, I wouldn’t expect German speakers to do the same. It would probably feel a bit unnatural to them. However, if a German speaker got to know my cat, they might eventually stop calling Steve eine Katze and start calling him ein/einen Kater.
We can learn a couple things from my cat and my violin: Firstly, cultural conventions gave my violin masculine gender. In this sense, my violin has semantically masculine gender but no grammatical gender in English. Secondly, when grammatical gender and semantic gender conflict (as they do for both Tom and Steve in German), grammatical gender wins in some cases, and semantic gender in others. In particular, semantic gender tends to win the more person-like the thing we’re talking about is, like our furry family members.
What about people?
Because of semantic gender, linguistic gender for people acts a lot like forms of polite language, like titles or honorifics (Conrod 2019). Speakers of languages like Dutch or German consider a variety of social factors when choosing to refer to someone using formal or informal ‘you’. How old is the person? Are they in a position of authority? Do they seem ‘hip’? Are they related to you? All these factors matter, and if you use the wrong form of ‘you’, the problem isn’t that it’s ungrammatical, it’s that it’s inappropriate, disrespectful, or in some cases, hurtful.
This is what it’s like for gender, too. We all use complex social reasoning when using gendered pronouns. Probably most of the time, we’re pretty good at getting someone’s pronouns right. But we’ve all probably also experienced running into a new person with an unfamiliar name or unexpected length of hair and getting it wrong. For this reason, just like for titles and honorifics, it’s often polite to ask someone what pronouns they use. And if there’s not a good moment to ask, it’s reasonable to avoid pronouns until it’s clear which to use, just like how you might avoid calling your friend’s mom by her first name until you know she’s okay with that.
So gender in language is complex and tends to be a matter of grammar for objects and a matter of respect for people. And of course, for sneaky feline gremlins, it’s a bit of both. But what if a language developed new pronouns? How would that even happen? If you want to know how Swedish changed pronouns and pronouns changed Swedish, part 2 of this blog series will be published soon.”
