The Chair is a Girl

In case you weren't aware, I'm required to learn French as well as the local dialects of Hausa and Zarma for my job as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Niger, West Africa. This is no small feat, given my less-than-average propensity for languages.

That aside, I was struck by something today as I was studying. In French, most words are assigned a gender. I was initially commiserating this fact as it makes learning the nouns that much more difficult, but it has social implications as well. Earlier today my dad pointed out that in casual conversation, if I were to tell him I was meeting "a librarian", I would say "le" or "la" instantly detailing whether this person is a man or woman.  In English, I would simply say I am meeting someone of that profession and leave it at that. The other party would need to ask the discriminating question if interested. Why, then, is gender of such import in this and other languages? Or perhaps I should ask - why the lack of interest in English? 

My dad further pointed out that in French (as well as other romantic languages) even inanimate objects are allocated a gender. I found this to be particularly interesting. Why is a chair (la chaise) "female?" Why is a desk (le bureau) "male?" A recent New York Times article by Guy Deutscher titled Does Your Language Shape How You Think? speaks to this question, wondering why genders vary for nouns such as "a fork" between German and Spanish. Check it out - I enjoyed it.

I think this is fascinating but I would like to come back to the social suggestions of having to reveal the gender of persons you discuss in everyday life. Of course, this information is naturally given throughout the course of most conversations. Yet I find it oddly constricting to be forced to give it up right away. Why can't a teacher be a teacher without being profiled as a woman or a man? Is this significant or have I gone off on some weird tangent? If you continue to follow this blog, you'll probably come across these sporadic posts every once in a while. Perhaps tomorrow I'll write about how the word for "divorced" in Zarma is the same as the word for "prostitute." I'd like to excavate those social implications!