“How do you know that mouse is a female?” That is the typical remark of my Spanish-native-speaker-husband after I automatically start talking about a mouse we have just seen in our garden as if it was a “she” (there’s an overpopulation of them this year). “Because it’s ta myš” is my usual answer. Ta myš means “that mouse” in Czech and the word ‘myš’ is of female grammatical gender. Not for the Spanish speakers though – el ratón is masculine.
It’s just a mouse, you might think. But this little story practically addresses the question that linguists around the world have been doing research on for years: Does language affect the way we think?
You might have heard of something called “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”. It is actually not a real hypothesis and Sapir and Whorf never wrote any work together, which is why we usually speak rather of “linguistic relativity”, a principle claiming that language can affect the worldview of its speakers. This theory remains somewhat controversial but nonetheless intriguing for many linguists, who continue to design experiments to show how different aspects of languages might influence how we perceive certain aspects of reality. Maybe not the reality as a whole but at least some parts of it.
There exists a number of experiments inspired by this theory addressing the grammatical gender and how it influences the native speakers of languages that express the grammatical category of gender. You can have a look at the following illustration and try the “experiment” yourselves. If you were supposed to give the following animals human names, what names would you suggest?
Were the names you used male or female?
If you are a (native) Czech speaker, chances are that your names would correspond with the grammatical gender these animals have in the Czech language:
If you are a speaker of a language which differentiates grammatical gender, chances are that your names would correspond with the grammatical gender of these words in that particular language. You can check the grammatical gender of the same five animals in three common European languages that differentiate the category of gender in nouns in the following table. Pretty different from Czech, right?
I gave this task to my Colombian husband and he named the animals as following: Miranda (the snake), Rebecca (the zebra), Peggy (the cat), Tito (the monkey), Roberto (the snail). The only animal where the name he suggested didn’t correspond with the grammatical gender of the respective animal in Spanish was the cat. And that is just because our own cat is called Peggy. You might remember her from our Instagram video (and yes, I know she's not black like the one here).
If you are a speaker of English (or some other language without the category of grammatical gender), you probably have no idea what all of this fuss is about. But maybe this little example will help you understand what role grammatical gender can play in certain languages, including Czech.
And if you are already learning Czech and would like to learn some basic rules on how to differentiate the gender of different Czech nouns, you can check our last Youtube video: