Psycholinguistic investigations of the way readers and speakers perceive gender have shown several biases associated with how gender is linguistically realized in language. Although such variations across languages offer interesting grounds for legitimate cross-linguistic comparisons, pertinent characteristics of grammatical systems – especially in terms of their gender asymmetries – have to be clearly identified. In this paper, we present a language index for researchers interested in the effect of grammatical gender on the mental representations of women and men. Our index is based on five main language groups (i.e., grammatical gender languages, languages with a combination of grammatical gender and natural gender, natural gender languages, genderless languages with few traces of grammatical gender and genderless languages) and three sets of specific features (morphology, masculine-male generics and asymmetries). Our index goes beyond existing ones in that it provides specific dimensions relevant to those interested in psychological and sociological impacts of language on the way we perceive women and men. We also offer a critical discussion of any endeavor to classify languages according to grammatical gender.
In this paper, we compare the diglossic situation of Biel/Bienne (oral Swiss German vs. written Standard German) with another diglossic setting: the village of Evolène (1500 inhabitants), located in the Swiss alps (French-speaking part of Valais/Wallis), one of the last micro-regions (along with the Alpine valleys of the autonomous Italian region of Val d’Aosta) where the Francoprovençal vernacular is still spoken. We take a closer look at the discourse of inhabitants who are "inside" or "outside" the diglossia (i. e. people who do or do not use the two varieties). In a first section we discuss the notion of diglossia for both contexts. The second section is based on several language biographies of people from Biel/Bienne and Evolène. Via some extracts of our research interviews, we describe different attitudes and representations related to the diglossic situation. In a last section we conclude by clarifying what seems most relevant to us in our data for the theoretical discussion of diglossia.
Daniel Elmiger1. Dans ce texte, nous n'utilisons le terme genre que pour désigner le genre grammatical. Pour désigner l'(auto)attribution à une catégorie de type femme, homme (ou autre) selon divers critères (sociaux, identitaires, etc.), nous utilisons le terme identité de genre, qui peut s'utiliser en complément de sexe, fondé sur des critères biologiques.
[Ce texte n'a pas de résumé].
L’auteur commence par souligner qu’une partie de la sociolinguistique contemporaine cherche à instaurer une rupture avec les étapes antérieures de la recherche dans le champ, et il justifie cette démarcation par la nécessité d’un changement de paradigme pour penser les liens entre langue et société dans le monde actuel. Cette rupture implique d’inventer de nouveaux termes pour signifier ce changement, mais l’entreprise comporte des risques. Il en vient ensuite à la critique de la notion de diglossie en relevant qu’elle fait abstraction des locuteurs, qu’elle est aveugle aux processus de domination, et qu’elle repose sur une conception mécanique des rapports entre langue et société. Enfin, il expose le choix devant lequel se trouvent les sociolinguistes d’aujourd’hui : remplacer définitivement la notion de diglossie par d’autres concepts moins mécaniques ( enregistrement , style ) ou revoir profondément la manière de théoriser la diglossie en la considérant comme une idéologie langagière.
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