A gender bender: is a toaster male or female in the Maltese language?

George Farrugia gave his speech to Masters and PhD graduands from the University of Malta at the Jesuits’ Church in Valletta on one curious of linguistic phenomena: the gender of inanimate objects in the Maltese language.

Unlike English, Maltese uses gender to distinguish its nominative singular forms – a toaster is a feminine toaster (toaster gdida and not gdid (m) = a new toaster; dak il-ballun and not dik il-ballun (f) = that ball).

It’s an old conundrum for speakers who, like myself, code-switch from English to Maltese constantly, and lose touch with the grammatical gender of these objects. To those who prefer gender-neutral (and simple) descriptions, the reason why qmis (shirt) is feminine even when a man is wearing it, is a bit of a mystery.

“It was an argument with my wife that ignited a spark for my research. She’d tell me: Il-freezer mhix tkessah (The freezer is not cold enough), and I would tell her: Il-freezer mhux ikessah,” Farrugia, a Junior College lecturer, said.

What at the outset seemed to be a trivial query, soon turned into an endless quest: “after four years of research I finally made a comparative analysis of our language with other languages... a subject that fascinated me so much that it developed into my doctoral research.”

After all, Farrugia asked himself, “we both speak the language... what right do I have to think my version is correct?”

We are used to refer to gender according to the biological gender of the noun. If you’re French or Italian, you refer to a cat according to its biological sex – le chat or la chatte, or il gatto and la gatta. In English it’s simply a cat. In Maltese, it’s qattus or qattusa.

But the jury is out on whether there is a link between the grammatical gender of nouns and natural gender of inanimate objects: a chair (siggu) is male in Maltese, but a table (mejda) is feminine. But a house (dar) is feminine in Maltese, male in Russian, and neutral in German... and in Bantù there are up 20 ‘genders’ (or classes, which are indicated by the prefix of the noun).

So if there is no intrinsic link between gender and noun, how do speakers transfer gender onto these nouns?

“The minimalist perspective argues that this relation is arbitrary in principle,” Farrugia says, but his research shows otherwise: a combination of information that speakers receive on these nouns, both morpho-phonologically (the sound of the word and its structure, which is why siggu ‘sounds’ male), and conceptually (how nouns refer to gender by way of their ‘mascilinity’ or ‘feminity’), helps us generate the link between nouns and their gender.

“The threat to the language is no longer foreign, but internal – we must stop treating our language as second class and speak it properly on our media and in the highest institutions of the country”

Indeed, Farrugia’s research claims that it’s the stereotype associated with a noun that gives it a gender, more than the way it sounds. So even pulizija (police), although feminine sounding because it ends with –a, is actually male – perhaps because it’s simply a job mainly associated with men.

So, inevitably, a policewoman now becomes pulizija mara but a female lawyer (avukat) is avukata. Or is it avukatessa? Or shall we just keep it avukat?

“I asked a police inspector who came to give a talk to a girls’ secondary school whether she preferred being referred to as spettura or perhaps spettrici. But she replied that feminine appellations like surgenta and spettura were considered disparaging and humorous in the corps, so she preferred the male form.”

Nor is it a linguistic ‘situation’ unique to Maltese, Farrugia says. “It’s a challenge our language encounters today, similarly to the challenges of the past. And because our language is flexible and can adapt, they are challenges the we can overcome.”

“The threat to the language is no longer foreign, but internal – we must stop treating our language as second class and speak it properly on our media and in the highest institutions of the country... it’s neither an antique nor something ‘unique’ that is fit for academics, but it’s an effective tool that serves us in all aspects of our lives.”

So who was right in the argument over whether a freezer was male or female? Farrugia’s answer comes on two levels.

“On a popular level, the statistics show my wife is right... But scientifically and linguistically, the psychological process by which speakers chooses one linguistic form over the other is actually complex and merits more study. So it’s not a dogma, and my study is a starting point on the subject.”