Gender-bender Diction
by Margarite Nathe
How to speak like a shaman.
When a male shaman transformed himself into a woman, he changed not only his voice to speak at a higher pitch, but also the language he spoke.
In the native Siberian Tungus language — which is where the word shaman originates — men and women spoke with different vocabularies and usages, and constructed their sentences in different ways. The speakers also added markings to nouns and verbs to indicate their own gender or that of their subject. “So the shamans who ‘became women’ started using different words, different ways of expressing themselves,” says archaeologist Silvia Tomášková.
It’s hard for us to understand because we don’t use gender markers in today’s English. Our language, which has lost the signifiers it had as Old English, is an anomaly among other Indo-European languages, Tomášková says. French has gender markers for nouns, and Slavic languages have them for nouns and verbs.
In Spanish, for example, the word for chicken — pollo — is masculine, because of the “o” at the end; the word for onion — cebolla — is feminine, as indicated by the “a” ending. The Japanese language still has distinct speech patterns for men and women, and even separate writing forms — hiragana for men, and katakana for women.
Tomášková, who spent her childhood in her native Czechoslovakia, says, “My brother grew up with two sisters and a mother, with my father gone for long stretches of time for work. So the only grammatical forms he heard were feminine and he repeated them, not realizing that he was ‘speaking like a girl,’ until my father came home and started correcting him.”
