Social Gender in a Language Without Grammatical Gender: Relational and Status Encoding in Kazakh Female Nominations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1609.32Keywords:
Social Gender, Kazakh language, female nominations, kinship terminology, language without grammatical genderAbstract
This article examines how Social Gender is organized in Kazakh in the absence of grammatical gender. The study is based on a lexicographically verified corpus of Kazakh female nominations, supplemented by a limited contrastive set of gender-neutral and male-linked kinship terms. The material includes basic female reference terms, kinship and affinal nominations, status-hierarchical designations, evaluative and address forms, socially conferred female roles, widowhood and step-relation terms, as well as analytic constructions marking age and social personhood. Methodologically, the analysis combines lexical-semantic, linguistic-anthropological, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic approaches within a framework that distinguishes Linguistic Gender, Natural Gender, and Social Gender. The results show that Kazakh female nominations form a structured lexico-pragmatic subsystem in which female reference intersects with relationality, hierarchy, evaluation, politeness, speaker dependence, and personhood-related distinctions. The analysis further demonstrates that this subsystem is not uniformly gender-differentiated: alongside female-specific nominations, Kazakh also employs selectively gender-neutral kinship terms and classificatory extensions, revealing where gender salience is strengthened, backgrounded, or redistributed. Social Gender in Kazakh is thus encoded not through grammatical agreement, but through a distributed system of relational, status-based, evaluative, politeness-based, speaker-dependent, and age/personhood-related nominations.
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