Arabic for Godless Heathens: Part III

How to have gender in Arabic

“The word 'gender' has been used to mean 'sex' so often, that the two words are nearly interchangeable,” my linguistics hero, JFF, once said. “Except that, as far as I know, teenagers are not yet having gender in the back seats of cars,”

Truth be told, I don't know if teenagers even still do it in the back seats of cars these days, but that's a musing for another time. Today, I would like to discuss linguistic gender, how it relates to biological sex and what all of this has to do with Arabic pronouns.

The only place linguistic gender still lingers in English is in our pronouns, and even there only when we talk about someone or something. The categorization of a “he” or a “she” or an “it” is relatively straight forward. Anything that is not alive or some sort of higher animal (like earthworms) is an IT. Higher status animals (dogs, cats...) that are biologically female are a SHE, biologically male a HE.

Things get a little more confusing when we start to talk about people. Generally, biologically male humans are HE and biologically female humans are SHE. Every newborn baby I've ever met, however, is an IT until a certain age. Consider the stock greeting card phrase: “It's a boy/girl.” Some allowances are made for cultural gender here. Unless you want your ass kicked by a pair of leopard-print, nine-inch heels, a drag queen is definitely a SHE.

Other than that, we've got little to worry about. English speakers don't need to remember whether a table or a pencil or a book is a HE or a SHE, and once we're talking about more than one of anything, all we say is THEY.

Arabic, like Spanish and French, has two genders: masculine and feminine. Thus, every noun (table or pencil or book or human being...) is either a HE or a SHE. Biologically male things are HE, biologically female things SHE. I don't know about earthworms or babies, though.

Unlike the Romance languages, however, YOU are also either masculine or feminine.

Gender in Arabic extends to the person you're talking to, not just the person you're talking about. So, while I have only say “you” no matter who I'm talking to, Arabic requires a masculine YOU-HE or a feminine YOU-SHE. And, since I don't often have a conversation with books or tables, that means ANTI (an-tee) for men and ANTA (an-tah) for women.

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