Women in the history of linguistics

This Introduction outlines the need for a ‘true history’ (Lerner 1976) of the role of women in the history of linguistics, which considers them on their own terms, and challenges categories and concepts devised for traditional male-dominated accounts. We start by considering what research has already been conducted in the field, before exploring some of the reasons for the relative dearth of studies. We outline some of the challenges and opportunities encountered by women who wished to study the nature of language and languages in the past. The geographical and chronological scope of this volume is then discussed. In a central section we examine some of the major recurring themes in the volume. These include attitudes towards women’s language, both positive and negative; women and language acquisition and teaching; and women as creators of new languages and scripts. We further explore women as authors, dedicatees, or intended readers of metalinguistic texts, as interpreters and translators, and as contributors to the linguistic documentation and maintenance. We consider how women supported male relatives and colleagues in their endeavours, sometimes in invisible ways, before reviewing the early stages of their entry into institutionalized contexts. The chapter concludes with a brief section on future directions for research.

Early American women’s participation in language scholarship

This chapter examines the contributions of early American women to the study of language. For the most part, ‘American women’ designates immigrants to North America and their descendants, although there is some presence of native women. An initial historical sketch shows that women’s access to language-related intellectual life from the 1600s was more restricted, and limited in scope, compared to that of men. Although gendered expectations and constraints generally inhibited their participation in language scholarship, those same constraints sometimes positioned women to make unique contributions to the study of language. American women played roles in six domains bearing on language. They worked as lexicographers, set social standards for language, and wrote grammars. Women contributed to translation and cross-linguistic communication, and to educating deaf students. Finally, women were active in missionary linguistics, a field in which their accomplishments may have opened the way to public acceptance of women language scholars.

Language studies by women in Australia

Few women contributed to documenting Indigenous Australian languages in the nineteenth century. Brief accounts are given of six settler women who did so: Eliza Dunlop (1796–1880), Christina Smith (‘Mrs James Smith’; 1809?–1893), Harriott Barlow (1835–1929), Catherine Stow (‘K. Langloh Parker’; 1856–1940), Mary Martha Everitt (1854–1937), and Daisy May Bates (1859–1951). Their contributions are discussed against the background of forty-four other settler women who contributed to language study, translation, ethnography, or language teaching. Reasons for the relative absence of women in language documentation included family demands, child raising, and lack of education, money, and patrons, as well as alternative causes such as women’s rights. Recording Indigenous languages required metalinguistic analytic skills that were hard to learn in societies that lacked free education. Extra obstacles for publication were remoteness from European centres of research, and absence of colleagues with similar interests.

Obstacles and opportunities for women linguists in Scandinavia

This chapter concerns the role played by women in the history of linguistics in the Nordic countries: Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Our main focus is on the period from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century, a period that began with the gradual emergence of the nation states of the North and the need for the codification of common national languages. Gradually, education became more widespread, and although the first schools were for boys, private education was given in upper-class homes and was thus also accessible for girls. The first grammarians were all men, so early on it is mostly behind the scenes that we find women involved in the study of language. Once women were allowed to participate in higher education, some of them made significant contributions to linguistics. In order to understand the role played by women, it is clearly necessary to view their contributions in the context of the age and society in which they lived.

Women and the codification and stabilization of the Arabic language

This chapter explores and documents women’s contributions to the codification and stabilization of the Arabic language from the fourth to the nineteenth centuries across the region that roughly corresponds to today’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Spain. Using the acknowledged sources of the Arabic language, namely pre-Islamic poetry, the oral and written process of transmitting the Qur’ân (holy book of Muslims) and Ḥadīth (Prophet Muhammad’s sayings and deeds), and consolidating practices such the construction of the language of Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and the teaching of Arabic, this chapter presents and reads women’s contributions to the codification and stabilization of Arabic as both direct and indirect. These readings are based on the linguistic value of women’s contributions and the contextualization of their legacy within an overall comprehensive Arab-Islamic patriarchy where women’s contributions helped establish the male canon in linguistic studies more than they served women as individual constructors of the Arabic language.

The history of the regulation and exploitation of women’s speech and writing in Japan

This chapter describes how women’s relationship to Japanese language has been defined, assessed, and exploited within the field of Japanese linguistics. After a brief history of language studies in Japan in the Introduction, the second section analyses the norms for women’s speech in conduct books (etiquette manuals) since the thirteenth century. The third section summarizes the arguments concerning women’s contribution to the development of kana script in the Heian period (794–1185). The fourth section examines the changing values assigned to two speech styles linguists have prominently attributed to women: jogakusei kotoba (‘schoolgirl speech’) of the late nineteenth century and nyōbō kotoba (‘court-women speech’) since the fourteenth century. The last section considers the shifting evaluations assigned to the works by two individual women, the Japanese translation of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) by Wakamatsu Shizuko and the codification of Ainu oral narrative by Chiri Yukie. Conclusions outline three major findings of the chapter.

The contribution of women to the Spanish linguistic tradition

In Spain, despite the unfavourable environment, some exceptional women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were eager readers of the classics; ‘learned in grammar’ and professors of Latin. At the same time, female ascetic-mystic writers helped to dignify the Spanish Romance language. The eighteenth century witnessed a proliferation of literary salons presided over by distinguished women, while translators abounded. By the late nineteenth century, female university professors were ceasing to be uncommon; they shone as translators and philologists, although certain renowned linguistic and literary institutions continued to close their doors to them. These women with a passion for languages made a key contribution to linguistics in Spain, but were sidelined due to the historical circumstances in which they lived; since then, they have faced a further exclusion, in that they are conspicuously absent from official linguistic historiography.

The female contribution to language studies in Portugal

This chapter analyses the contribution of women to the history of linguistics in Portugal from the sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century. To carry out this investigation archivist, bibliographic, and hemerographic sources have been consulted in order to understand this specific context. It has been used in a variety of sources that are representative of the women’s role in the linguistics field but also in the area of education and in the society in general. These sources range from grammars, dictionaries, and translations to texts on feminine conduct and education, literary and official texts. This essay follows a chronological order with a section for each century. In order to understand the role played by women and the difficulties they faced at that time, each section starts with an educational context, followed by the contributions in the production of materials in the field of linguistics by and for women.

British women’s roles in the standardization and study of English

This chapter traces key developments in the history and historiography of English, identifying women’s most-representative opportunities to engage with the linguistics of English and describing works that have earned their authors attention in modern scholarship. Women have shaped and studied the English language since speakers of a West Germanic language invaded Britain in the fifth century CE. Yet, given the subordinate status of women’s intellectual activities, their work was often oral, unacknowledged, or published pseudonymously or under a male’s name. While identifying individual women’s contributions to the standardization and study of English, I consider women’s educational opportunities and their stereotypical social roles. Their family’s status and (typically) male relatives’ support gave some women unusual advantages. Women’s stereotypical associations with domestic conversation and elementary pedagogy gave later women space to work and write on the vernacular, though persistently in ways that were low-prestige.

European women and the description and teaching of African languages

Women have contributed to the description of African languages in academia and in mission stations since the dawn of the twentieth century until the end of colonialism. From the beginning their publications were received as well as those of their male colleagues, even though they were disadvantaged in their scholarly work. In academia they had fewer opportunities to make a good career than their male colleagues and usually had less prestigious jobs. Some women assisted the male linguist in the household as learned spouses, sisters, or daughters. In Catholic and Protestant missionary congregations, men usually received a professional training, some even in linguistics, while only educated women could be sent as missionaries on their own. In Protestant congregations, women without professional education would be sent only as wives or sisters of a male missionary.