Gender and Language in South-Eastern Europe: Linguistic Manifestations of Gender Conceptualisations in Albania, Croatia, and Serbia

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Lann Hornscheidt; Professor Dr. Christian Voß
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2010 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 168297049

On the basis of three south-eastern European transition countries, Albania, Croatia and Serbia, the project examines the interdependency of gender-political and gender-linguistic aspects: the de- and re-standardization (that is extremely dynamic by European standards) implicates the construction of one's own Europeanness, which entails the language policy implementation of the EU gender equality policy. The project from a pragmatic-sociolinguistic perspective, based upon new gender theories, analyses the conceptualization of grammaticalized gender-(un)specific personal appellations. By means of perceptional studies, the role of linguistic appellation practices in discrimination processes will be tried out empirically in parallel test series, in order to point out similarities and differences of the three examined countries. In doing so, we can obtain detailed data regarding the connection between socio-political developments, language policies and gender conceptualizations.Our research so far has shown, that masculine nouns are being understood and used as allegedly gender neutral forms of personal appellations in the conventional language usage of all three countries (so-called androgeneric forms). As to which extent such an equalization of gender-unspecific and gender-specific male appellations has discriminating or privileging effects on the perception of individuals and groups of persons, little or no linguistic research has been conducted in these countries. The languages focussed on feature derivational possibilities to build symmetrical appellation forms. Nevertheless, the post-communist backlash as a re-traditionalization or return to tradition of gender roles often results in an open rejection of a gender sensitive language policy.The aim of the project applied for is to add new and important dimensions to the hitherto existing research results: the corpus linguistic examination of personal appellations in Croatian, Serbian and Albanian and the development of new and differentiated perception analyses. This way, the project is not only of pioneering importance for the examined language area, but it also provides an impetus regarding methodical and methodological issues for international gender studies and linguistics.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants