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The Great Awokening as a Global Phenomenon (PDF warning!)
I'm never entirely sure what to make of linguistic analysis--partly because it is very much outside my expertise. But it seems worth noticing when quantitative research is conducted on issues many of us take for granted. For one thing, there have been a couple of highly publicized "you can't even define woke!" takes injected into popular discourse recently, but the author of this study doesn't seem to have encountered any serious difficulty with the definition (though presumably not everyone will agree with the definition on offer, it strikes me as at least plausible).
For another, the timing and differences across cultures is interesting to me. I have always kind of assumed that the Great Awokening was something that happened in the U.S. and then caught on elsewhere, to varying degrees, but while that may in fact be true, it doesn't seem to show up strongly in this data. I guess one question might be whether this just shows that the Internet has really flattened the world in surprisingly strong ways.
Relatedly, the author's questions re: causation also seem important, though I have no idea where to even begin answering that. I do regard the Great Awokening as mostly just a re-re-rebranding of Marxism, focused on social relations instead of economic status, in much the way that so-called "cultural Marxism" did in the late 20th century. But then, why has it caught on now? If it's because of the long march through the institutions, shouldn't we see less of an effect in non-Anglophone nations with dramatically different political histories? Or is this again just the Internet working its dark magic?
Even before the internet, there would have been conferences, books, publications, movies, etc. It shouldn't be forgotten that people have and will travel to the colleges of powerful nations because it's a fairly good path to doing better paying work. Basically, the Great Awokening was when it burst into the mainstream, but the ideas had existed for decades before that. Sensitivity and DEI training in the private sector has research papers from as early as the 1980s.
We should really be asking why it took until 2014 for it to happen since this began in the 1960s.
I can't say exactly why it appeared then, but I suspect it may have simply been inevitable. Basically, there had to be some point where what people were teaching in colleges was going to set the political agenda of millions of people, and 2014 ended up as that time period. The internet probably played some role, however, since social media facilitated a very fast way to organize with one's digital identity.
While I appreciate such papers, I kind of have to wonder how much it matters. Most discussions about wokeness aren't over whether it has or has not spread to the rest of the world, everyone just takes this for granted.
I heard the sex/gender distinction in West Africa like...13 years ago from a high school English teacher who'd studied psychology.
Keep in mind: there is absolutely no sex/gender distinction in our local language, and we don't use gender specific pronouns. A lot of the word games played in English are just utterly non-viable.
But she just repeated the dogmas ("gender is totally distinct from sex") like fact to a bunch of schoolkids whose parents would probably be outraged - if they understood the implications.
And I don't recall being particularly skeptical either - why would I be? Our entire education system was based on the English GCSE. We used English textbooks to learn "social issues" and we had a module on the Suffragettes but no such course on our own history. The English (and Americans) obviously knew better.
Western cultural hegemony is a helluva drug. The only reason I wouldn't say it's inevitable is cause, absent a lot of the structures in the US, there is a good chance of a reactionary backlash that'll crush woke activists.
There is barely one in English either, to be honest. It seems to have been shoehorned retroactively because the sex descriptors are adjectives -- "female" as a noun is, er, quite objectifying as used, and I can see why it upsets some feminists -- and the gender descriptors are nouns: "woman [career]" is awkward too.
English doesn't seem to gender its nouns anyways though? French does it, but English doesn't seem to. The only ones that come to mind are referring to ships or countries as "she".
Worth keeping in mind, I think, that the grammatical gender of nouns in Romance languages is essentially arbitrary and has no relation with sex or socio-sexual gender. In Italian, knives (coltelli) and spoons (cucchiai) are masculine, while forks (forchette) are feminine; a table is masculine when you are working on it (tavolo) and feminine when you are eating on it (tavola); one egg (uovo) is masculine, but two eggs (uova) are feminine; bones may be masculine if they are scattered (ossi) but are always feminine if they are part of a set (ossa); female bumblebees are masculine (bombi), while male giraffes (giraffe) are feminine; and so on. As far as I know, that's the case for other Romance languages as well.
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There was a comment pointing out a few weeks ago about French's gendered nouns being 'neutral' and 'feminine' so I feel obligated to point it out even though I can't find it at the moment.
It does when you want to use an indefinite article, but nobody calls it gender even though it serves the same linguistic purpose.
English's indefinite articles are not gendered (a, an). Pronouns have something you could call "gender" (though I think it is not), and nouns have that thing too (in that there's a pronoun that agrees with them) but no gender markers (aside from borrowings, mostly from French). And in general the English vestigal "gender" is only used to match with biological sex, except things like ships and (sometimes) countries.
The fact that there are two of them serves the same linguistic purpose.
The a/an distinction is exactly like the le/la or un/une distinction in that it's fundamentally a smoothing tool to make the language sound correct when spoken, and is something you just end up getting a feel for after a while because you know by the character of the language which category you're in. (And "gender" is... kind of an ideal way to describe that.)
If we didn't have an in addition to a we would have a glottal stop instead, which isn't really natural in English outside of a few regional dialects.
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"Make the language sound correct" is absolutely not the reason why nouns have gender in Romance languages. They just have it because Latin did. That's it.
And as a native speaker of a Romance language, I can assure you that in my mind, inanimate objects "are" the gender of they word in my language. Same for most speakers of Romance languages, AFAICT.
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In English it's not about "sounding correct" it's about it being easier to pronounce.
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