New Books Network Sophie Salvo, "Articulating Difference: Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth Century"(U Chicago Press, 2024)
Mar 1, 2026
Sophie Salvo, Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and author of Articulating Difference, explores how nineteenth-century German thinkers entwined sex and language. She traces philosophical origin myths, missionary reports repurposed as evidence, debates about grammatical gender, and women’s strategies to claim linguistic authority. The conversation links those historic formations to present-day language culture conflicts.
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Gender Was Built Into Language Science
- 19th-century German language science treated gender as a foundational explanatory premise rather than a mere metaphor.
- Sophie Salvo shows philosophers used assumed sexual divisions in household roles to conjecture language origins and methodology.
The Male Prototype Replaced Reciprocal Origin Stories
- Around 1800 origin narratives shifted from mixed male–female pairs to solitary male prototypes to define 'human' language.
- Salvo argues thinkers like Herder and Humboldt equated rational language origins with masculinized traits such as selbsttätigkeit.
Primitive 'Women’s Languages' Became Global Proof
- Early missionary reports of Caribbean 'women's languages' were reinterpreted by 19th-century linguists as evidence of a universal feminine speech.
- Scholars conflated localized gendered speech practices with a global claim that 'all women speak differently.'
