NPR recently ran a very interesting piece on gender in language called Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong. Lera Boroditsky, an assistant psychology professor at Stanford, conducted an experiment to determine whether the gender of nouns affects the characteristics people assign to them. This is something I have always wondered about. As a native English speaker, this concept of gendered nouns was completely foreign to me until I began studying Spanish. In Spanish (among other languages), every noun has a gender, whether or not the thing represented has actual genitalia. Every noun is given metaphorical genitalia. I've often wondered how words are assigned their particular gender. Like why is the Spanish word for "table" (la mesa) feminine and the word for "plate" (el plato) masculine? What is so feminine about salt (la sal) and so masculine about garlic (el ajo)? And how does that gender assignment influence how those words are understood?

The gender of a noun is not entirely consistent across languages. For example, the word for "bridge" is not assigned the same gender in every language. The word for bridge in German (die brucke) is feminine, but it is masculine in Spanish (el puente). For her experiment, Boroditsky asked native German and Spanish speakers to describe a bridge. The German speakers used words like beautiful, elegant, slender, pretty, and fragile.

And the Spanish speakers chose words such as strong, sturdy, towering, big, and dangerous.

Boroditsky found the same pattern of differences in other words as well. The word "key" is feminine in Spanish and masculine in German. Spanish speakers described "key" with words such as lovely, shiny, and tiny. German speakers used words like jagged, hard, and heavy.

To determine whether something other than the gender assignment might be causing this curious pattern, Boroditsky created a language called "Gumbuzi" and arbitrarily assigned its nouns genders. She then gave American students who spoke only English, and so had no experience with gendered nouns, a crash course in the made-up language. After studying the language for one day, the American students showed the same pattern, unconsciously ascribing the nouns with the supposed characteristics of their gender. Boroditsky concludes that this proves that language influences how we see the world.

Listen to the whole story here.