Why do languages use gender?
No, noun gender does not imply that Derrida was correct.
Many of the world’s largest, and most widely spoken, language families possess some concept of gender. Male, female, or perhaps neutral. Animate vs inanimate for some Native American languages. Whilst grammatical gender forms a subset of general noun classification (as Swahili shows) or adjective inflection (if gender agreement is present), there exists an uncanny correspondance with gender classification in reality. Kinship terms in Indo-European languages, and the English pronouns, are prime examples of this. Yet why does this correspondence exist? What can it tell us about human nature?
One notable explanation is tractability. Consider the French port vs porte, or point vs pointe. These words differ only in gender, yet carry distinct semantic meanings. Gender allows you to apply constant scaling to your lexicon, thereby reduces the costs of creating additional words. You suddenly have a lot more options to play with. In addition, noun classification can assist with the general process of categorisation. For instance, Swahili has a noun class for abstract nouns. The map of semantics then becomes a lot easier to navigate.
Likewise, gender facilitates comprehension. If the noun for uncle is masculine, and the noun for aunt is feminine, then this classification eases learning. You remember that the word for uncle or aunt must be masculine or feminine respectively, which reduces the pool of words to recall. The noun possessing a gender also provides additional information for reference, as clues if you struggle to recall, if you’re just acquiring language or learning a foreign language.
Sounds plausible enough, but then why do many languages possess a neutral gender? For the same reason that all English pronouns aside from the third-person singular do not possess gender. Sometimes we may want to aggregate the genders together, or sometimes the semantics of a word possesses a meaning that corresponds to both of the genders to some degree. This is contrary to the postmodernist claim that gender is an arbitary classification that we impose on the world, rather than us using the simplest tools possible to assist our understanding via establishing linguistic correspondance to reality.1 In economics pedagogy, the most common metaphor to illustrate the purpose of theoretical models is the Tube map. We judge a formal system, or at least a matrix of associative relations, via how easily using such allows us to understand the world accurately. Language is no different.
Nonetheless, the gender classification itself can appear somewhat arbitrary. Why for instance do only the third-person pronouns in English possess gender and the others do not? If we are referring to multiple third-persons, that we want to refer to as individuals rather than a group, then the gender of our objects is an intuitive means of distinction. This can be consistent with Derrida's perspective that language creates and reinforces social hierarchies. It can also be consistent with a non blank-slatist interpretation of human nature where the division of the sexes is one of the key phenomena that drives natural selection. However, the fact there is always a semantic logic behind the use of gender distinctions suggests this classification is not solely arbitrary, and therefore the direction of causality is likely from human nature to language as opposed to the reverse.
What do we make of the claim that gender classification is inherently sexist? Is it even related to reinforcing the patriarchy anyhow? Many large families, such as Turkic or the East Asian families, lack gender. Are they egalitarian paradises? Why do we not have classification based on race, nation, or any other tribal identity2? There does not appear to be a correlation between discrimination vs noun classification, which again undermines the postmodernist view of epistemology.
Honorifics in Japanese arguably introduce distinction based on class or seniority. However the “polite” noun is used for general acquaintances you’re unlikely to establish friendships with regardless of social positioning. Same with the French pronouns. However, this does suggest that social rank is an important enough variable to emphasise in a language, but this does not necessarily impose a link to discriminatory hierarchies.