Leiden University Student Repository

Faisal, Maira (2024)

A Crisis of Gender: Investigating the Gender Assignment of English Nouns in Urdu Code-Switching

Bachelor thesis | Engelse taal en cultuur (BA)

In Urdu, all nouns are gendered, and this gender is visible in the way that other word classes agree with these nouns. English does not have the grammatical category of gender, and English nouns are inherently genderless. This paper investigates the criteria used by Urdu speakers to assign gender to English nouns when they are code-switched into Urdu discourse. I identified four such criteria which have been found to influence such gender assignment in other languages—morphological factors, phonological factors, semantic equivalency and hyponymhypernym relations. I used these criteria as a framework to analyse the gender assignment process in Urdu. I created a questionnaire in which native Urdu speakers were prompted to inflect certain words which must agree with the English nouns in Urdu sentences, and analysed the results. All four criteria were found to influence gender assignment.

code-switching, grammatical gender, gender assignment, agreement, Urdu, English nouns

Author

Faisal, Maira

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Linguistics

Supervisors

Elenbaas, M
Lipták, L

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en