ABSTRACT
This chapter explains some of the main ways that languages create and reflect the social category of gender. The social gender system actually originates in language: Many languages have systems of categorizing nouns and speakers must change how they say things based on the ‘gender’ category of the noun. In both vocabulary and grammar, then, languages do lots to encode gender binaries. Once created, they tend to end up being asymmetrical, reflecting and helping to perpetuate the power imbalances in the gender ideology of a society. Gender and sexual ideologies have probably their most serious consequence when it comes to how cultures understand issues of sexual consent and rape. People draw on gender categories widely for metaphorical work because gender ideologies are so widely shared. The metaphors can work in the opposite direction when the adverbial connotations of masculinity or femininity are used to describe or add qualities to objects.
