ABSTRACT
In the context of social perception we automatically sort people into social categories. These categories help us to form impressions quickly and effortlessly by using our past experiences and our past knowledge, and they guide new social encounters. One of the most important social categories is sex (Stangor, Lynch, Changming & Glass, 1992). The importance of the social category sex 1 is also reflected in the grammatical structures of most, if not all, languages. The languages of the world differ in many respects, be it their phonological shape, their grammatical structure, or lexicon. There is also considerable variation as to how the sexes are represented, for example, with which words and differentiations, in which grammatical forms or types of sentences. But, interestingly, there does not seem to exist a single language – not even among the so-called genderless languages, as will be shown below – which lacks expressions for femaleness and maleness altogether: The sexes are represented in some way in all language systems. Apparently sex is so fundamental to social organization and social structure that linguistic means to refer to this category are indispensable for speech communities.
