The transformation of French bardache, ultimately a borrowing from Italian denoting the passive partner in sex between men, to English berdache, referring to Native American nonbinary gender identities or roles, involved a complex translinguistic dialogue in North America in the early nineteenth century. This history has never before been adequately explained. While berdache is now largely obsolete and considered offensive due to its exoticizing, colonialist, and ethnocentric origins, its multifaceted history encapsulates variation and change on phonetic, graphic, semantic, pragmatic, axiological, and ideological levels. In recent decades, Indigenous queer people have adopted Two-Spirit as a means of challenging this imposed categorization and asserting linguistic self-determination. With the aim of correcting previous accounts and omnipresent misconceptions about the history of the lexeme berdache, this paper uses a qualitative philological method to describe the development of this internationalism from a linguistic perspective.
Unlike most areas involving taboo, where language-internal innovations tend to dominate, homosexuality is characterized by a basic international vocabulary shared across multiple languages, notably English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. Historically, the lexis of nonnormative gender identity has shared space with that of sexual orientation. This lexicon includes (inexhaustively) the following series of internationalisms: sodomite, bugger, bardash, berdache, tribade, pederast, sapphist, lesbian, uranist, invert, homosexual, bisexual, trans, gay, queer. This common terminology has resulted from language contact in a broad sense, and more specifically from lexical borrowing (loanwords). Several framing devices are expressed through the lexicon: religious censure, distancing in time and space, othering, medicalization or pathologizing, but also in recent decades LGBTQ self-assertion and demands for equality. Rather than necessarily being subject to taboo, then, queerness represents a pragmatically marked semantic field in which the lexicon is highly dependent upon social factors and the communicative context.
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