ABSTRACT
In some languages gender distinctions are grammaticalised, while in others females and males are referred to with the same grammatical forms. An utterance in a genderless language does not always contain formal clues to the gender of the persons mentioned. Are genderless languages then gender-neutral languages? Do they express egalitarian attitudes? These questions will be addressed in the present paper, taking Turkish as a case in point. The empirical studies to be described were conducted at various universities in Ankara from 1995 to 1997. The central hypothesis underlying the studies is that a genderless language structure cannot be equated with gender-neutrality. Instead, the “gender belief system” 1 which has evolved in the language community was expected to have permeated into the semantics of the language with gender biases emerging behind the structural neutrality. The sociological background of the project, which cannot be dealt with here, was examined on the basis of pertinent publications as well as interviews with Turkish scholars in the field of gender research. Theoretical aspects, such as the semantics of categorisation (esp. prototype semantics, for example Rosch 1977), theories of natural classification as developed by Lakoff (1982a, b) as well as the theory approach to classification developed in psychology (e.g., Murphy and Medin 1985), will also be excluded from the present discussion. 2 Neither have I touched on the complementary issue of how women and men may use linguistic variables differently. Studies of this type are lacking on Turkish, although they have been conducted for other languages in the Middle Eastern context, for example on Arabic (see Amara, Spolsky and Tushyeh, El-Essawi, YasirSuleiman and Al-Wer all in this volume).
