The public sphere has been concerned with a proposal to standardize the Serbian language to include names of professions with feminine suffixes, which do not really have an equivalent in English, and for which we have traditionally used masculine forms. In this lecture, we take the feminist struggle for equality as a point of departure and we discuss a few main arguments against the proposed change. The most common argument is that such forms are not natural, that they are grammatically degraded, and there even are some accusations of violence against language. We will reexamine the argument of naturalness and the intuition on which it is based, and show just how adjustable they are.

Another argument against such a proposal is that the prominence of feminine gender forms is in conflict with the feminist struggle for equality. It relies on the hypothesis that grammar is an efficient, economical system which forces a hierarchy between forms, such that masculine forms are often the default and feminine forms are marked. We will question the markedness of feminine forms and its connection with women’s place in society.

The third argument against the proposed change that we will discuss is found within a wider context of resistance against political correctness. We will conclude the lecture questioning whether the focus on feminine gender forms is just a distraction, as well as whether and to what extent it could support the feminist struggle for equality.

Ivana Đurović is a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She teaches multiple linguistics courses at colleges across the University, including introduction to linguistics, sociolinguistics, structure of language, etc. In addition to the interaction between language and society, Ivana also does research in formal semantics. The topic of her dissertation is compositional structure of subjunctive conditionals in Serbian.