Abstract
Psycholinguistic investigations of the way readers and speakers perceive gender have
shown several biases associated with how gender is linguistically realized in language.
Although such variations across languages offer interesting grounds for legitimate cross linguistic comparisons, pertinent characteristics of grammatical systems – especially in terms of their gender asymmetries – have to be clearly identified. In this paper, we
present a language index for researchers interested in the effect of grammatical gender
on the mental representations of women and men. Our index is based on five main
language groups (i.e., grammatical gender languages, languages with a combination
of grammatical gender and natural gender, natural gender languages, genderless
languages with few traces of grammatical gender and genderless languages) and three
sets of specific features (morphology, masculine-male generics and asymmetries). Our
index goes beyond existing ones in that it provides specific dimensions relevant to
those interested in psychological and sociological impacts of language on the way we
perceive women and men. We also offer a critical discussion of any endeavor to classify
languages according to grammatical gender.