Gender identification in Chinese names
Introduction
In western languages, a person's first name often, though not always, identifies their gender. The question is sometimes raised whether this is also true for East Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean.1 The present article investigates this question for Beijing Mandarin Chinese, referred to below as “Standard Chinese” or just “Chinese”. For Chinese, a person's gender cannot always be identified from their name. Examples of names that could (and actually do) belong to a female or a male are given in (1):
However, in many cases it is possible to guess, with some degree of certainty, that a name belongs either to a female or a male. In this paper we investigate three factors that play a role here: 1) the use of particular characters or parts of characters (referred to as ‘radicals’), 2) sound symbolism, where “lighter” sounds (such as front vowels) are associated with females and “darker” sounds (such as back vowels) are associated with males, 3) reduplication, where female names tend to have character reduplication to a greater extent than male ones.
In this article we discuss these factors, illustrate them with examples, and investigate the relative strength of each in gender identification. For instance, is it the fact that when two of the factors mentioned above favoring a female identification are present in a Chinese name, chances are greater that it belongs to a female than when only one is present? Secondly, some of the factors are associated with written language (use of special characters) while others might play a larger role in spoken language (sound symbolism). We investigate the difference in predictive force in both linguistic modalities in the second part of this article, where we test these predictions by comparing them to the results of an extensive psycholinguistic experiment in which Chinese subjects were asked to identify a name as female or male, either in written form, spoken form, or both.
This article is organised as follows: in section 2 we present background information on Chinese onomastics in general. In sections 3 Female vs. male characters, 4 Sound symbolic effects, 4.1 Sound symbolism: vowels, 4.2 Sound symbolism: tones, 5 Reduplication we identify the factors that bear on gender identification: gender-specific characters or radicals, sound symbolism (in particular, related to vowel quality), and reduplication, respectively. In section 6 we investigate the relation between these factors and present them as one small grammar-like system, and note the predictions (corresponding to the degree of confidence one can have whether a given name is female or male) this grammar makes, based on a large corpus of names we analysed. We test these predictions in section 7, on the basis of a psycholinguistic gender-identification experiment with native speakers of Chinese. Section 8 discusses empirical and theoretical consequences of this investigation, focusing on the sets of female- and male-specific characters and on the relation between sound symbolism and reduplication, and identifies a number of issues for future research.
Section snippets
Background
Naming children is a very serious matter for Chinese families. In rare cases, given names for children are selected before birth, i.e. at a time when the child's gender may not yet be known. Names are generally selected on the basis of positive semantic characteristics but must also be euphonic and perceived as beautiful and well-balanced in writing. The choice of names therefore reflects cultural attributes that are deemed important by parents and other family members. We return to the formal
Female vs. male characters
Female physiological features and socio-cultural roles, as perceived or envisaged by parents, tend to emphasize characteristics like beauty, elegance and nobility. In males, features such as strength and courage may be envisaged. Such properties may be reflected in the characters selected for female and male names, which makes it possible to guess a name's owner from the written form, or, if the character concerned can be identified unambiguously in speech, by hearing it (in many cases, the
Sound symbolic effects
In this section we discuss whether there are sound-symbolic effects that can help to identify Chinese names as either female or male. Synesthetic sound symbolism refers to “[processes] whereby certain vowels, consonants, and suprasegmentals are chosen to consistently represent visual, tactile, or proprioceptive properties of objects, such as size or shape” (Hinton et al., 1994: 4). That is, both segmental factors, such as place of articulation of consonant and vowels, and voicing, can play a
Reduplication
Reduplication is related to sound symbolism in that both may be used to express diminutivization (see e.g. Moravcsik (1978) and Abraham (2005) for this general observation about reduplication, and Bates (1986) for Lushootseed, Aoki (1994) for Nez Perce, Kouwenberg and LaCharité (2005) for Caribbean Creole languages, Mattes (2006) for Bikol, and Hora et al. (2007) for Hebrew, among others). This probably underlies the frequent use of reduplication for female names in Chinese, which has been
Relations between the factors
So far, we have seen that a number of characters are specific, to some extent, for female and male names. Secondly, there were clear sound symbolic effects, limited to the vowels /i/ and /ɤ/. Thirdly, reduplication was highly typical for female names. In the present section, we investigate how these factors interact. We also discuss how these predictions are different for the written form and the spoken form of names: e.g. a certain sound sequence when spoken can often not be identified with a
Testing native speakers
We asked Chinese informants to identify given names as female or male. We expected their responses to (roughly) confirm to the predictions that were outlined in the previous section, taking into account the difference between written and oral form. The experiment was therefore run in three conditions: written text, oral, and both written and oral.
We randomly selected 100 male names and 100 female names from our database. To obtain spoken versions, we employed a publicly available text-to-speech
Discussion and topics for further research
In this article we identified a number of factors that contribute to gender identification of given names in Standard Chinese: the presence of clues in the written versions of the names (female- and male-identifying characters), sound symbolic tendencies (the front vowels /i/ is predominantly used in female names and the vowel /ɤ/ in male names; tones play no role in gender identification, although tone 2 is especially common in names for both genders) and reduplication (especially common for
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
We thank Chen Wenjun, Gao Hua, Clemens Poppe, Marjoleine Sloos, Wang Hongyan, Zhang Jisheng, audiences at several presentations and two anonymous Lingua reviewers for comments on earlier versions. We alone are responsible for any errors of fact or misinterpretation.
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