coriphallus:

I. Introduction: A Question of Language

Now that the Qunari have been thoroughly butchered, I wanted to compile my thoughts on gender under the Qun into a more comprehensive ‘essay.’ This is not primarily an essay about politics, identity, or even gender in the contemporary Western sense. It is an essay about language.

More specifically, it is about what happens when we attempt to understand a foreign culture through English.

Whenever discussions surrounding the Qun arise in online spaces, one phrase inevitably dominates the conversation:

“Under the Qun, your gender is your role.”

Most players interpret this quite literally. If someone is a warrior, then they are a man. If someone fulfills another social function that’s conventionally feminine, then they are considered a woman. The conclusion appears straightforward, and I suspect it is also the interpretation the writers themselves ultimately settled on.

I intend to dismantle it for my own amusement.

Not because I believe the games secretly intended something else, nor because I think this interpretation is objectively incorrect, but because I approached the Qunlat from a linguistic background fundamentally different from that of English. My first instinct was not to ask, “What does the Qun believe about men and women?” My first instinct was to ask, “What does the Qun mean by gender?”

This analysis is my attempt to explain why.

My native language lacks gendered pronouns. There is no equivalent distinction between “he” and “she.” At first glance, this seems like a language where gender is largely irrelevant.

Counterintuitively, that is very much untrue.

The absence of gendered pronouns does not eliminate gender from a language. Instead, it changes where gender lives.

II. Where Language Stores Gender

English speakers constantly encode gender in ordinary conversation without consciously thinking about it.

“I saw her yesterday.”

“He said he would arrive tomorrow.”

Before these sentences can even be spoken, the speaker must already know which pronoun to choose. Gender becomes one of the first pieces of information retrieved when referring to another person.

This process is so automatic that most native English speakers never notice it.

Turkish works differently.

The sentence Çöpü attığını gördüm simply means:

“I saw them take out the trash.”

The sentence contains no information whatsoever regarding whether the person observed was male or female. In fact, depending on context, the subject can even remain ambiguous between 2. and 3. person singular. The information simply is not grammatically required. It is not exposed unless it’s required.

It does not mean Turkish speakers are incapable of perceiving gender. It means the language does not force speakers to encode that information every time another person is mentioned whereas English requires it.

Now consider Czech.

Viděl jsem ji vynášet odpadky.

Before we even reach the object of the sentence, the grammar has already revealed something about the speaker themselves. The viděl tells us that the person speaking is male.

Spanish encodes something else.

La vi sacar la basura.

The pronoun identifies the observed person as feminine while la basura independently marks the noun “trash” as grammatically feminine.

None of these languages have more or less genders than the other for both the object and the subject. They simply distribute gender differently.

Some require information about the subject.

Some require information about the speaker.

Some require information about inanimate objects.

Some require almost none at all.

Every language obliges its speakers to express certain kinds of information. English demands tense where Mandarin often relies on context. Japanese frequently encodes social hierarchy where English does not. Czech marks grammatical case in places where English instead relies on word order.

These are not merely quirks of vocabulary, they shape what information speakers must continually keep available while communicating.

Linguists sometimes refer to this as obligatory grammatical information. A language does not necessarily determine what its speakers are capable of thinking, but it certainly determines what they must routinely express. That creates a substantial distinction.

Popular discussions often invoke the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the idea that language determines thought, as though speakers of different languages possess fundamentally different thought patterns. Most modern linguists reject that for various reasons.

Language does not provably constrict thought. It can, however, influence it by making some distinctions obligatory while allowing others to remain optional.

An English speaker cannot naturally produce the sentence “I saw…” without deciding whether to continue with him, her or them. A Turkish speaker can. That information is stored in the previous context so they fundamentally ask different questions.

III. Gender as Grammar

This brings us to grammatical gender.

One of the most common misconceptions among speakers of languages that lack variety of grammatical genders is the assumption that grammatical gender must somehow reflect biological sex.

It rarely does.

A French speaker does not believe a baguette is female. A German speaker does not think a girl is literally neuter because das mädchen happens to use neuter grammar.

The grammatical category exists independently of biology. Its purpose is structural. Gender in language determines how words behave, which articles accompany them, which adjectives agree with them, which suffixes they receive, how they are declined (or not)…

Gender, in other words, is less about describing reality than organizing it.

A noun belongs to a category because the language requires it to belong somewhere to function.

Native speakers rarely question why a chair is feminine or why a bridge is masculine. The categories simply serve as a part of the language’s internal logic. Trying to explain grammatical gender to someone whose native language lacks it often produces the infamous question;

“But why is the chair female?”

The answer, of course, is that it isn’t.

The chair is not female.

The word belongs to a grammatical category that English simply lacks (i.e. Masculine inanimate as a grammatical gender carries more information about the state of the object than its 'sex’). The confusion arises because learners instinctively attempt to translate one conceptual framework into another. What if, I began to wonder while playing DAO, the same thing was happening with Qunlat?

What if “man” and “woman” were not 1=1 translations?

What if they were approximations?

What if the game’s medium of English language was doing the only thing it could do; mapping an alien system of classification onto the nearest concepts available?

Whether that was the writers’ intention is beside the point. I think the possibility itself warrants exploration. Because if the Qun’s concept of gender functions less like biological identity and more like grammatical classification, then many conversations throughout the series become open to entirely different interpretations.

This is going to be a long read.

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