Second Call for Papers for a special issue with Theme: "Anthropologies of Gendered Language in Italian communities" (original) (raw)
Related papers
CARLONI Notes on the Gender Issue in the Italian Language 200427 118066 1ff2ytt
VOYAGER, 2017
This article wants to highlight the most important aspects of the gender issue in Italian; it also aims to suggesting a strategy for linguistic policies that could counterbalance the perceived discriminatory effects of some lexical and grammatical features of the language. The Italian language – like other Indo-European languages – classifies the gender of nouns into masculine and feminine. Concordances with linguistic elements within and outside of the syntagma are dependent on this classification. There are many points of discussion and research tied to the classification of masculine and feminine, some of which are illustrated in this article. The aim is not to answer all of the questions around the issue, but rather to focus on the following matters: how did the masculine/feminine opposition take place in the field of linguistics? Is this difference purely morphological or is there a semantic issue? If it is, how does is it demonstrated? Finally, is there evidence for the predominance of one gender over the other and what are the strategies for its attenuation?
Fuori dal Binario: Linguistic Gender in the Italian Context
This thesis explores linguistic gender both fundamentally and with specific regard to the Italian language. Grammatical, lexical and connotative gender exist within thousands of languages across nearly all language families and work in unison with our cognitive frameworks to inculcate all speakers a rigid gender binary. Starting with an analysis of linguistic gender and then looking at Italian as a case study, my thesis aims to define the use of linguistic gender within the Italian language and how that system may or may not be changing to accommodate a more fluid understanding of gender. In order to track possible changes to Italian, I examine both textual and media representations of transgender and non binary persons, as well as regulations established by the European Union and other governmental agencies with regard to gender neutral language used for official purposes. Such regulations are examples of verbal hygiene which is the driving force for prescriptive language change, and it is through the process of verbal hygiene that linguistic accommodation can occur for those who do not fit within the existing gender binary.
Little Women and Vital Champions: Gendered Language Shift in a Northern Italian Town
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2006
The connection of language to class is clearly implicated in the language shift in progress in the northern Italian town of Bergamo. Gender also plays an active part in this shift in terms of linguistic practice and language ideology, as a gendering of languages is occurring such that the local vernacular, Bergamasco, is linked to men, and the national standard, Italian, to women. This article demonstrates that this gendering is one mechanism of language shift, as it impacts the linguistic division of labor across genders in Bergamo. With men in charge of revitalization and women responsible for language socialization, fewer children are growing up speaking Bergamasco. [gender, language shift, language ideology, Italy, Bergamo]
After a brief description of the two previous Special issues on Italian sociolinguistics (both appeared in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language in 1989 and 2011), a general overview of the main trends of today's Italian sociolinguistic research is given. It is maintained that a relevant portion of linguistic research carried out in Italy during the last few decades falls almost entirely within the boundaries of sociolinguistics. Then an outline of the most relevant aspects of the Italian sociolinguistic situation is sketched, in order to highlight the main issues dealt with in Italian sociolinguistic studies. Much attention is paid to the Italian repertoire and to the studies focusing on the different dimensions of variation in the Italian language: i.e. the ongoing process of restandardization; the regional, social and functional varieties; spoken varieties of Italian; but also historical sociolinguistics, linguistic policy, language and gender and so on. The paper will then give a brief summary of the various papers of the present Special issue.
The third gender of Old Italian
We demonstrate that Old Italian had a three-gender system within which the neuter still qualified as a fully fledged gender value. To substantiate this claim, we adduce evidence showing that (a) Old Italian had three distinct sets of controllers, each of which selected a separate agreement pattern; (b) to each one of those three controller sets, including the neuter, nouns were assigned belonging to different productive inflectional classes and (c) the neuter still selected at least one dedicated agreement formative, thereby still displaying traces of its original status as a target gender. This novel evidence from Old Italian squares well with what is known about past stages of other Romance varieties. Also, we briefly address the consequences of our results both for a reconstruction of the Latin-Romance transition and, more broadly, for the theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the diachronic development of gender systems.
Fragments of Linguistics Works from the Italian Genizah - 2014
in Vidro, N., I.E. Zwiep, J. Olszowy-Schlanger (eds), A Universal Art. Hebrew Grammar across Disciplines and Faiths, (Studies in Jewish History and Culture Series), Brill, Leiden-Boston, 2014, pp. 137-161.
This is a digital offfprint for restricted use only | © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV
Gender Inclusive Language in Italy: A Sociolinguistic Overview
Jomela - Mediterranean and European Linguistic Anthropology, 2023
The debate on inclusive language in Italy is reaching wider audiences through social media. While scholarly investigations on the use are still at the embryonic stage, experts and scholars are attempting to put forward the reasons why a more inclusive language could benefit (Italian) society. Specifically, in the last few years, the debate has moved from masculine and feminine forms to ways in which a grammatical gender language can become inclusive. This means to overcome the binary (feminine / masculine) and to propose strategies to include non-binary identities and others in the LGBTQIA+ community. Abbou (2011) argues that the use of gendered language is motivated, mostly from the widely studied perspective of how people are talked about and referred to (see also Formato 2019). In advocating this position, we discuss how motivation can be used by the LGBTQIA+ community to position themselves. Motivation appears at the crossroads of grammatical patterns and a social gendered imaginary. Based on this, we present the main linguistic strategies that have emerged, the-u, the asterisk *, and the schwa /ə/, all replacing the morphological gendered inflections. In exploring such strategies, we aim to shed light on how language is employed to widen the understandings of gender and sexuality. In addition to that, we engage in the verbal hygiene debate, started by Cameron in her seminal work (1995), and presenting a political scenario in which opposition to inclusive language and a push for it, co-exists.
Is Italian a Sexist Language? “Nomina Agentis” and the So-called Overextended Masculine
International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences
Italian is often accused of being a sexist language because the masculine form always prevails; feminine names are always a minority (compared to the masculine ones); very often, one word, used in the masculine form, has a positive connotation, but the same word, in the feminine, has a negative one. There are many kinds of sexism (linguistic, behavioural, political, implicit, and criminal) as well as many ways it can be conveyed in the real world. This paper will focus on the linguistic form. The Italian language makes extensive use of the so-called "maschile sovraesteso" or "universale" (overextended or universal masculine). In sentences where the nouns are all masculine or all feminine, the adjective keeps the same gender in the plural form. However, if nouns have different genders, the adjective follows the masculine plural form. For example: "Ho fatto amicizia con un ragazzo ed una ragazza spagnoli" (I made friends with a guy and a girl, both Spanish). "Spagnoli" is the Italian adjective for Spanish used in the plural masculine form. The gender does not change even if there are five girls and only one guy. The choice for the masculine plural form does not depend on the numerical majority. To prefer the masculine plural form in case of the coexistence of masculine and feminine singular nouns is discriminatory. Using the so-called universal masculine is a sexist way to write Italian.