DECONSTRUCTING THE PERCEPTION OF GENDER IN LANGUAGE

The concept of gender was introduced in our early stage of learning English and Bengali prescriptive grammar. In the field of gender, the difference between English and Bengali is related to pronoun. As in case of English, the pronouns, which are used for 3rd person singular number (he, she, it), are assigned to sexual perception. But in Bengali there is no gendered pronouns. In both of these languages all the non-living things come under the category of Neuter Gender and among the living things some nouns (in case of English some pronouns too) assigned to masculine referents, come under the category Masculine Gender (boy, balaka etc.) and some assigned to feminine referents, come under Feminine Gender (girl, balika etc.). And the rest unrecognisable nouns are Common gender in general (baby, śiśu). This is the simple perception of Gender in language because these languages do not have any masculine or feminine perception for nouns, unless they refer to biological sex. But there are many languages who have gender for each and every noun. They are called the gendered languages. According to Wikipedia In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns inherently carry one value of the grammatical category called gender the values present in a given language (of which there are usually two or three) are called the genders of that language. Such as, Sanskrit, Hindi, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian etc. According to Jemma Prior, gendered language is commonly understood as language that has a bias towards a particular sex or social gender. So most of the time it is said that language through its communicative functions biases the social gender representation. This paper aims to highlight that the idea of Gender in a language is assigned with two different linguistic aspects suggested by Gottlob Frege, i) Sense and ii) Reference. In this paper an attempt is made to establish the different perceptions of Gender between the gender of a word and the gender of the object which is referred by the word.