Thinking in Gender: Language and Association

A small research on the representation of gender in language taken from different perspectives, different languages and different cultures. This research will mainly look at the multiple gender recognitions across a variety of languages, including Romanian, Greek, Spanish, Polish, and English, and will take into consideration bilingualism. It involves male and female students at higher education who are of the age between 18-26, as well as adults between the ages of 40- 50. There are two parts to this study; in the first part, the subjects were asked to read a series of words and answer a series of questions after each word. These words are all nouns and include beings, objects and notions. The second part involves the subjects again reading a series of words and answering a series of questions, but the words include other nouns (e.g. persons). The analysis of the findings, shows how gender influences language and vice versa. Furthermore, the findings also showed that subjects tended to assign genders to different verbs, regardless of the articles used in the different languages. Individuals who have a gendered native language, tended to assign genders to words that their native language was assigning them, only when they thought of or translated in that language.