Gender: Our gaps in perception

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Dark and light blue: our gaps in perception

Photo: DER SPIEGEL

The state chairman of the Hamburg CDU Christoph Ploß now apparently wants to have punctuation marks banned.

Of course, this deliberately under-complex representation is incorrect.

Of course, Ploß doesn't want to just censor colons, for example out of anger at punctuation - but rather the idea behind their use, the "ideology" behind gender.

That is precisely why I would like to take this opportunity to travel through the stars in a completely non-ideological linguistic way.

The Belarusian-American cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky, for example, was able to identify a connection between the words we use and the way we think in her research.

It starts with unsuspicious articles.

There are three grammatical genera in German, each noun is assigned a gender: feminine, masculine, neuter.

However, the grammatical genders of nouns differ from language to language.

In German the sun is feminine, in French it is called

le soleil,

for example

,

in Spanish

el sol, so

the gender is masculine in the two Romance languages.

According to Boroditsky, this affects how we think about the named object.

If you ask Germans and Spaniards to describe a bridge, gender influences the choice of adjectives.

German-speaking people use stereotypically feminine ascriptions to describe the bridge: the bridge is "beautiful" or "elegant".

If, however, a Spanish-speaking person discusses a bridge, they will use words with stereotypical masculine connotations.

For someone socialized with Spanish, the bridge is more "strong" or "long".

Another example is the designation of colors: Russian-speaking people have the cognitive ability to distinguish between shades of blue because of their way of naming different types of blue: In English there is only one word for blue, but in Russian there is a distinction between two Varieties: dark blue (siniy) and light blue (goluboy). If you grew up linguistically with these two terms, you have had experience from an early age of perceiving and differentiating between these two colors.

Boroditsky explains: “If we test how well people can distinguish between these colors, we see that Russians cross this linguistic limit more quickly.

You can distinguish between light and dark blue more quickly.

(...) Anyone who has two words for light blue and dark blue is surprised when the colors change from light to dark, according to the motto: 'Oh, something has fundamentally changed here', whereas the brain of English speakers does not makes a clear separation, is not surprised, because nothing fundamental changes. "

more on the subject

• Post from Augstein: You, he, itA column by Franziska Augstein

• CDU politician Ploß wants gender ban: "This language shows a completely wrong path" An interview by Kevin Hagen

• Gender equitable language in Europe, Asia, Africa and America: This is how the world is changing

• Gender-appropriate language: Is that * now German? By Felix Bohr, Lisa Duhm, Silke Fokken and Dietmar Pieper

The brain of Russian-speaking people no longer recognizes blue because the eyes of Russian-speaking people would be better or different.

But because, through language, they enable the brain to see different blues.

How we limit our perception of the world, on the other hand, can be seen from the word "skin colors".

In a figurative sense, make more shades of blue visible

The first association you have in your head is probably kind of "beige", right? We have obviously defined and internalized a Central European skin tone as the standard color for skin in such a way that it is only noticeable how surreal, strange and wrong the word is when an attempt is made to give a black person "skin-colored" clothing, "skin-colored" plasters or " "Skin-colored" make-up for sale.

Equating the word "skin-colored" with beige creates a matter of course for a description of reality that is simply wrong. Why should we want to do this? To reproduce reality inaccurately by using incorrect words when we know and can do better? Out of habit? For convenience? These reasons alone are not really convincing, but above all we have to reflect on the consequences.

Our way of choosing words illustrates the gaps in perception that we inevitably have due to linguistic routines - as explored and described by Boroditsky. But we also reproduce these gaps in perception. While blue is a shame about the goluboy, these cognitive comforts or habits can exclude people and make them invisible in other language decisions. In a linguistic world in which "skin colors" are automatically beige, black people obviously do not appear mentally.

So even the inconspicuous and unsuspicious in language usage, even articles in front of bridges, obviously do something to the way we think about things. As a social working hypothesis, this can be negotiated calmly at first. Or you react with defiant prohibitions - bad, because this connection is being discussed and there are attempts to make more shades of blue visible in a figurative sense.

So it is not correct of me to say that Christoph Ploß only wants punctuation marks to be forbidden. It is, of course, about the ideals that these punctuation marks want to tell: inclusion, equality, visibility. You can find the * and: exhausting, old and unaesthetic, there are even valid arguments against gendering. But even the attempt to threaten with bans does not feel like a strong bridge as the start of the election campaign. More like a beige compression stocking.