Can a genderless language change the way we think?

Turkish, with its gender neutral pronouns, encourages more inclusive thought

There were many things I loved about The Idiot, a quirky novel by Elif Batuman about a Turkish-american girl navigating love and linguistics at Harvard in the mid-1990s. But one of my favourite aspects was its insightful observations on language.

Ms Batuman’s bilingual heroine, Selin, is fascinated by the relationship between language and thought. She muses on the special Turkish suffix that is used to relate information acquired second-hand, and how it means always having to contemplate your “degree of subjectivity” in a way that doesn’t happen in English.

The book brought to mind another feature of Turkish: the absence of grammatical gender. Turkish has just one word — the simple “O” — to mean he, she or it. Verbs are not gendered. Nor are nouns such as “teacher” or “actor”. When someone talks about an unnamed friend, it is possible to listen to an extended discussion without knowing if they are female or male. I wondered what Turkish could teach longstanding efforts by feminists to remove inbuilt sexism from English and, more

recently, campaigns to promote gender neutral pronouns.

Turkey may at first seem to be no great endorsement of the benefits of erasing grammatical gender. On one hand, there are many prominent businesswomen and the proportion of female Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) graduates is the second highest in Europe.

But Turkey has the lowest rate of female workforce participation in the OECD, and patriarchal structures run deep. Those who do eschew classic gender roles or heterosexual norms — including transgender people — face discrimination and sometimes violence. There seems little evidence to show that removing bias from language has a meaningful impact.

Research on Turkish by Friederike Braun, an expert on linguistic gender, seems to support this view. She found that even when gender is not marked grammatically, certain terms still contain “covert gender”. In surveys, respondents assumed that “nursery school teacher” referred to a woman and “police officer” to a man. Even neutral terms such as “person” and “humankind” came with an inbuilt assumption of masculinity.