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.
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.
But...that's gender, linguistically speaking.
[1] http://sites.la.utexas.edu/persian_online_resources/pronouns...
(Edit: reduced absoluteness, because lack of grammatical gender feature can be found in some Indo-European languages)
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.
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.
As an aside, I don't think Spanish has a word that's quite like "obliged". Maybe "endeudado", but that's just "in debt" and is not particularly about favors.
grammatical gender of a person == physical gender of that person
I am handsome.
I am beautiful.
I told my girlfriend she was handsome the other day and she objected strenuously.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/355908/why-is-ha...
Apparently not:
I did it myself: Eu fiz eu mesmo/Eu fiz eu mesma.
And most adjectives. Actually, "obrigado" is "obliged" so the phrase "much obliged" is equivalent to the Portuguese "muito obrigado".
Japanese does have gendered first-person pronouns, though the textbook standard one "watashi" is neutral. In Japanese, pronouns in general (including fp) are used less than English; they are only used when there is ambiguity, names are often preferred to pronouns, and in casual speech it is even OK to refer to yourself by your name (like Jimmy from Seinfeld.)
In the textbook, Japanese doesn't really have gendered patterns to verb conjugations. Verbs are rather conjugated based on level of formality, for example "itte-ru", "itte-imasu", "itte-orimasu" all mean "I am going" in ascending degree of politeness. There are also impolite/brash-sounding forms "iku-zo", "ikou-ze", "ike", etc. which tend to be said more by men (or teenage boys) but women can use them too, it's just not "lady-like".
That said--it is fair to observe that in film for example samurai and geishas speak essentially two different sounding languages, more so than a knight versus a princess. Men are expected to be rugged and use "rugged" words; women are expected to be beautiful and use "beautiful" words. There are definitely words, speech, and tonal patterns which are more masculine and feminine, but in anime for example these differences are exaggerated far beyond real-world conversational norms.
Yes, and not only in anime. The stereotyping of language by gender, occupation, social class, etc. is pervasive in Japanese popular culture. The linguist Satoshi Kinsui calls this practice yakuwarigo [1].
It also exists in translations into Japanese from English and other languages, with dialogue in novels being rendered into stereotyped forms, even though the original dialogue was not marked for gender and Japanese people often do not speak that way in real life, either. I worked as a Japanese-to-English translator for many years, and those gendered translations in the other direction always felt strange to me.
I’ve discussed this issue with Japanese translators several times over the years. Most of them said that they were uncomfortable about using those stereotyped forms but that their publishers and, they presumed, the readers expected it. Times are changing, though. Just last month, the Asahi Shimbun ran a series of articles [2, 3, 4; paywalled and in Japanese] about changing attitudes toward gender stereotyping in translations into Japanese.
In real language use, sociolinguistic differences often vary by the individual and the situation. I’ve known Japanese women who never—except maybe when being sarcastic—use the pronouns or sentence-ending forms that are typical of female characters in manga and anime. The faculty meetings at the university where I now teach are conducted in very formal Japanese, and I have never noticed anyone use an expression in those meetings that seemed typically masculine or feminine. Real-life professors don’t talk like professors in manga, either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuwarigo
[2] https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASPCB6KD1PBTUPQJ009.html
[3] https://digital.asahi.com/articles/DA3S15110092.html
[4] https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASPCD3FPHPBPUPQJ014.html
Do you have any examples of this?
Not saying I don't believe you, but unless the text contains something very obvious (e.g. "my wife"), I often can't tell if the writer is a man or a woman.
It's much easier to tell in Italian, French or Spanish, for example, all languages where the gender of the speaker is baked into most sentences.
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1023448/FULLTEXT...
Playing "guess why" is the fun part :) I'm sure there are other tools available now and I'd love to hear of them if people are aware of them!
I'm curious, could you give me an example please?
In French, you will say "Je suis content" if you are male, and "Je suis contente" if you are female.
The trailing "e" change the pronunciation: in the male variant, the trailing "t" is silent, while it's not in the female variant because of that "e".
- "amie" is feminin of "ami"
- "enseignante" is feminin of "enseignant"
- "elle s'est engagée" is feminin of "il s'est engagé"
Edit: note that the concept of "gender" in indo-european languages is only vaguely related to the concept of "gender" as in human sexual expression. For example "la nouvelle année scolaire" ("the new school year"), "année" is considered feminin, so "nouvelle" has to be adapted to the feminin, instead of the masculin/neutral "nouveau". But that of course doesn't make any sense if you only consider "gender in languages" to be about male/female.
But this relates to the gender of the friend, not of the speaker.
I am not a French speaker by any means so feel free to correct my words.
There is nothing to correct, you’re right ;)
First, it's true that Romance languages use gender in this manner. I was just pointing out that the specific example chosen didn't show this. The example has nothing to do with the gender of the speaker, but with the gender of the object under discussion; it's similar to you saying "she" or "her" when referring to a woman; it enables me to make no assumptions about your own gender.
Second:
> Anything the speaker would say about themselves would have to be gendered accordingly.
In Spanish there are careful ways to avoid making assertions about yourself in a gendered manner. They are a bit more roundabout, but can be done. My point is not that this is the most natural way of speaking, just pointing out that it's technically not true that you must always make gendered assertions about yourself.
Example:
Instead of saying "I'm very tired", "estoy muy cansado" (gendered male language) I can say "tiredness overcomes me", "el cansancio me invade", hiding my gender. Yes, it's a bit artificial but not so uncommon I have never read it. So in Spanish you can make assertions about yourself without betraying your gender. Don't know about French or other Romance languages, but it wouldn't surprise me to know you can employ similar tricks. It's probably harder in Spanish than in English to hold a conversation longer than a couple of sentences while hiding your gender; it will start sounding very unnatural, I grant you this.
I'm tired (male) -> estoy cansado
I'm tired (female) -> estoy cansada
In French it works the same way, although I'm not confident enough in French to give you an example without making horrible spelling mistakes. But the idea is the same.
I'm tired (male) -> Je suis fatigué
I'm tired (female) -> Je suis fatiguée
Je suis tombé -> Eu sou caído (or Eu sou tombado) Je suis tombée -> Eu sou caída (or Eu sou tombada)
In the U.S., the normalization of gay marriage has involved a lot of cultural strife over the past few decades.
One may still encounter cliques in the U.S. that refuse to accept grammatical constructs such as "her wife" for various reasons.
This kind of question reminds me of "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him"
"We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as well.
Is it? I think it's rather interesting. Though not really as much of a language dialect rather than a perspective shift, as if the men and women on average interpret the world differently.
It should be a pretty easy test to do, for those with the trained classifier; I wonder why they haven't reported on doing it.
> we noticed ‘my wife’ and ‘my girlfriend’ emerged as strongly correlated in the male results, while simply ‘husband’ and ‘boyfriend’ were most predictive for females. Investigating the frequency data revealed that males did in fact precede such references to their opposite-sex partner with ‘my’ significantly more often than females. On the other hand, females were more likely to precede ‘husband’ or ‘boyfriend’ with ‘her’ or ‘amazing’ and a greater variety of words, which is why ‘my husband’ was not more predictive than ‘husband’ alone. Furthermore, this suggests the male preference for the possessive ‘my’ is at least partially due to a lack of talking about others' partners.
To disentangle the effect of topic choice from word choice, you'd probably need a controlled study with fixed writing prompts.
Polish does this too.
It's clear that many factors contribute to one's choice of language.
In the mid-1950s people studied the differences between the English spoken by the upper class ("U") and middle-class ("non-U") in the UK - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English .
In the US, a Black American may grow up with speaking African-American Vernacular English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...), and code switch to speak a more general American dialect.
My freshman year roommate spoke more "Southern" when on the phone to family than when talking to others in the dorm.
The language of a scientific monograph is quite different than the language of an HN comment, and being able to write in that style suggests an academic training.
So I'm not surprised that gender can also be a factor in word choice. Indeed, a friend of mine who reads romance novels claims a common difference between male and female authors is how they describe clothing.
If you want to describe all of those as different languages ... I've long given up trying to understand the differences between 'dialect' and 'language' (much less 'sociolect', 'ethnolect', 'stylistic register', etc) so go right ahead.
But I'm hesitant to believe that "Any significant text" predicts a specific author's gender "with considerable confidence."
I know of several cases where people tried and failed to guess an author's gender. Robert Silverberg, for example, found "something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing"; James Tiptree, Jr. was the male pseudonym of a female author. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr.)
Searching Google Scholar, I find articles like https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2109/2109.13890.pdf saying:
> However, other gaps need to be addressed as well, including that no method of classifying age or gender—both of which are aspects of author profiling—that also considers the genre or nature of the analyzed text has been widely endorsed. Beyond that, to the best of our knowledge, no research has involved surveying or comparing the different approaches used in author profiling. In fact, current knowledge about the task is largely based on small-scale experiments conducted to find a reliable classification method with a near-zero error rate. In order to use forensic authorship profiling as admissible evidence in courts, the proposed methods must have about 100% accuracy. The average accuracy of good proposed methods are ranging from 70-85% [5]–[9]. However, the proposed methods still suffer from low accuracy.
That suggests that the "with considerable confidence" you refer to is on a population level, and not a per-person level. Rather like how, with considerable confidence, I can say that in general men are taller than women, even though many women are taller than many men.
The imitation game is adversarial (both players try to convince the interrogator that they are the woman, or the human). GP was talking about non-adversarial settings.
"Warm Worlds and Otherwise" is a significant text.
I'll grant this qualifier for purposes of discussion. In that case:
- if someone writes using adversarial methods, can that person's gender still be detected? How much text is required?
- Here are male authors who wrote romances using a female pseudonym - https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/104973.Male_Authors_Who_... . Can we presume they used other adversarial methods? I do.
- How many people are trained to write using an adversarial style?
(Quoting the top Google hit for "write like a man" at https://www.timsquirrell.com/blog/2017/3/29/write-like-a-man... : """Teachers often make up for this by telling their female students, either explicitly or implicitly, to "write like a man". This means that they should write confidently, "objectively", not hedging their arguments, coming down boldly on one side of an issue, etc.""")
- Are all gender mis-identifications due to the authors using deliberate adversarial techniques?
English is definitely on that continuum, by the way. Any significant text (just a few paragraphs) has enough clues to predict a speaker or writer's gender with considerable confidence. This shows up most dramatically with statistical models (including deep learning) but trends with particular grammatical constructs and word choices were noted long ago.