Grammatical Gender Differences In Language

Today people speak on approximately 7,009 distinct languages (Simons & Fennig). The process of globalization increases the number of bilingual people. In 2006 Sweden had the highest percentage of the bilingual population in European Union - 97% (European Commission). Language is a tool to express thoughts. The current increase in a number of bilingual people perplexed linguists, anthropologists with the question "Does language affects the way people think? " In the beginning of the 20th century, Sapir- Whorf hypothesis became popular. This hypothesis had two versions: strong –language determines thinking and limits it; weak – language shapes thinking (Werner and Oswald 77). Today the strong version of hypothesis proved to be irrational. However,

Grammatical gender is «a noun class system, composed of two or three classes, whose nouns that have human male and female referents tend to be in separate classes» ("What Is Grammatical Gender?"). From language to language grammatical gender system varies. Often it is divided into masculine and feminine (e.g. Spanish, French, Arabic); masculine, feminine and neutral (e.g. German, Greek, Russian); animate and inanimate (e.g. Basque, Ojibwe); common gender and neuter (e.g. Danish, Swedish). The English language used to have grammatical gender but by the end of 14th century, it disappeared because there was no need to use it with the articles the and that. According to this division, speakers of different languages can group, understand, and associate grammatical gender of nouns differently. In order to see how grammatical gender affects the way we think we can take an example of art. "Jakobson (1959) reports: “The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists: he did not realize that ‘sin’ is feminine in German (die Sünde), but masculine in Russian (rpex)" (Boroditsky and Segel) An experiment of Edward Segel and Lera Boroditsky aimed to identify the connection between grammatical gender of allegory (hate, love, sin) and the biological gender of allegory in artists’ work. The results of this experiment showed that there is a connection in grammatical

Time is an abstract concept. "Time can be perceived as static or flowing, as fixed or continuous, as horizontal or vertical, as moving from left to right, from right to left, or from front to back. " For instance, English speakers describe time using horizontal spatial metaphors. "The best is ahead of us» spatial metaphor demonstrates how English speakers perceive time. Mandarin speakers use the horizontal metaphors rather than vertical to describe earlier events (up) and latest events (down). Another difference in perception of time is how people describe the duration. English speakers talk about the duration of time in terms of length. For instance, "today’s class was not long". Whereas, Spanish and Greek speakers measure the duration of talk in terms of amount. "For instance, the expressions megali nychta, or megali schesi in Greek (literally meaning big night, big relationship, respectively) have the connotation significant for English speakers, who use a different spatial metaphor, long, to express a great length of time (Casasanto et al., 2004)." (Fulga 29). Lera Boroditsky held an experiment which aimed to identify if language affects time perception or not. English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration and vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order ( Boroditsky). "Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these