Language And Gender Identity

Language is the backbone of every society and culture in the world. Without a shared language between members of the same family, tribe, town, or country, communication would be extremely difficult and sometimes even impossible. The possibility for the sharing of ideas, values, and traditions would nearly be lost without some form of language. While global communication between members of different countries has become increasingly easy due to technological advances in translation software, there are still some questions that arise when analyzing and comparing how life is perceived between people of different tongues. After all, many countries have phrases and words that describe things that we as Americans have no concept of, and in turn we have phrases and words that would be completely foreign to other cultures as well. Does this change the way we view the importance of certain concepts that we encounter in life, however? The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that not only does language influence the way we prioritize certain things, but also how we perceive them all together. In this essay we will consider the possibility that our language changes the way we see the world, and how our …show more content…
Apart from the obvious polarization of gender in American culture, by way of segregating boys and girls in school and determining the appropriate color scheme based solely on the gender that you are assigned at birth, language plays a huge role in determining how we and others around us view gender. In the English language, for example, some words are differentiated by gender in the third-person singular. She, her, hers, he, him, his are English words used to automatically convey the gender of the person being spoken about. This gender-defining language attribute in the English language seems somewhat miniscule when compared to the Hebrew language, however (Ember