Gender and language

This chapter highlights how, in the case of Italian, it is particularly challenging to determine whether the correlation between gender and language stems from mere sociolinguistic variation or should, rather, be regarded as a structural and necessary variation, rooted in the dual subjectivity of language and gender, female and male. While one cannot speak of a differentiated language in terms of rigid and exclusive variants, it is nonetheless possible, in Italian, to identify a range of variants, styles, or registers, each associated with distinct linguistic features across various structural levels of the language (phonetics, prosody, lexicon, discourse pragmatics, etc.). Within this continuum of variation, where gender plays a significant role, Italian operates dynamically, retaining more pronounced traces of gender difference in the lexicon.