If I were to receive a research grant to conduct linguistic study, I think I’d do a comparative study with two languages and how they deal with gender. I’d pick one language that has a very strong concept of gender, like French or Spanish, and compare that to a language that lacks gendered nouns, like Turkish or Vietnamese. I think I’d have to spend a significant amount of time in each country in order to gain a deep understanding of how they treat gender in their language. I think I’d be looking at the question of does a strong concept of gender in language equate to or influence a strong perception of gender roles in society. It would be fascinating to compare languages and cultures like that. I realize that it’s difficult to compare very different societies or languages or cultures, so that’s where the research question would come in. I’m interested in gender roles in general, so to examine how a society perceives and expresses gender via their language and they way they relate and speak would be fascinating topic. I’d look at articles and pronouns and if they’re gendered or not, as well as where they come in the structure of a sentence (syntax), and I’d look at how stringent societal and cultural gender roles are. Obviously whatever conclusion I come to would only deal with the country and language I was studying and not make any claims about language and gender as a whole, because that’s a much larger question, but I think it could be used a starting place for other researchers.
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