The Whorfian hypothesis and habitual awareness of natural gender

Abstract

Dano-Norwegian, the Sami language and Finnish express animacy differently in their grammatical gender systems. While Dano-Norwegian has an elaborate grammatical gender system with overt marks on the nouns, Finnish and the Sami language have no overt grammatical gender systems. The Dano-Norwegian referential gender system specifies the natural gender of the referent. Finnish specifies whether the referent is human or not, while the Sami language does neither. In Dano-Norwegian and Finnish there are lexical expressions that indicate the referent s natural gender, but these are few in the Sami language. These differences allow a comparison of the different languages based on the semantic features natural gender and human. In this thesis, I have compared results from four different samples, two Finnish samples, one Dano-Norwegian sample, and one sample with speakers of the Sami language. My hypothesis is that linguistic differences affect the habitual awareness of such features. To test the hypothesis I wanted to measure awareness of natural gender as a variable compared to awareness of other variables. I used a questionnaire to measure classification of variables. The results indicate that there are no significant differences in relation to the variables natural gender and human between the samples.