Grammatical Gender

Grammatical Gender manifests in different languages all over the world(Armenian, Igbo, Spanish), though it does not contribute any implications on how different genders are treated equally, its formation serves as a basis of influencing our cognition and connotations of different genders.

Some objects, as Boroditsky proposes, are characterized based on the connotations they give off. For instance, the word “bridge” in German -- “Die Brucke” -- gives off a feminine theme for its beauty and aesthetic purposes, yet its masculine counterpart in Spanish -- “el Puente” -- characterizes more on the bridge’s engineering as well as its rigidity. Another example she gives is the key, feminine in Spanish for its pristine and intricateness, but masculine in german for its jagged metallic feel. From the polarization between these two European languages. The gendered characterization of these inanimate objects in language comes from the inventors of that language’s sense perception, which inturns, unconsciously shape how we, as a part of the contemporary society, draw certain masculine or feminine aspects of an object in the characterization of it. One possible implication is that we may apply these gendered aspects of objects onto certain physical characteristics of others -- resulting in unwanted objectification.

Does this grammatical gender present a major issue contributing to the usage and the impacts of gender-discriminatory? To a limited degree. However, this aspect of language shows how human cognition of stereotypically gendered traits have come to influence the creation of language