New Books in Critical Theory 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 who researches language, gender, and intellectual history, explores how nineteenth-century German thought linked sex and language. She traces origin narratives, debates over grammatical gender, missionary reports of "women’s languages," and women scholars' counterstrategies. The conversation also ties these legacies to modern language culture wars.
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Household Imaginaries Shaped Language Origins
- Nineteenth-century language sciences often relied on gendered household imaginaries to explain language origins.
- Philosophers used assumptions about male rationality and female domesticity to build conjectural histories of how language emerged.
The Human Became Masculine In Origin Stories
- Around 1800 origin narratives shifted from mixed male–female pairs to solitary male exemplars as language was recast as inherently human and rational.
- That move linked 'human' with masculine attributes like rational reflection, excluding women as full exemplars of language-making.
Carib Reports Became Evidence For Women's Language
- Early missionary reports of Caribbean 'women's languages' were repurposed by 19th-century linguists as evidence of universal female speech differences.
- Scholars conflated isolated ethnographic accounts with a global genderlect to bolster the scientific status of their claims.
