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Baltimore Sun editor John E. McIntyre tells you why you should forget everything your teacher taught you when it comes to gender-neutral pronouns.

The idea that men and women use language differently is conventional wisdom-appearing everywhere from Cosmo and Glamour to The Journal of Psychology and Anthropological Linguistics. Recent research, though, suggests that the most important variable is not the sex of the person doing the talking, but that of the person being spoken to.

You know when you're searching for a word, or trying to say something more nicely than you actually mean it, or trying to make up your mind after you've already started speaking? Whether you reach for an "um" or an "uh" in those situations might depend on whether you're male or female. Our verbal pauses actually speak volumes: "Like," as eighth-grade English teachers will tell you, makes the speaker sound young or ditzy; "sort of" smacks of uncertainty. But according to the linguist Mark Liberman, who works at the University of Pennsylvania and blogs at Language Log, even a difference as subtle as the one between "um" and "uh" provides clues about the speaker's gender, language skills, and even life experience.

For he/she's a jolly bad pronoun How English Lost its Genders When Nouns Grew Genitals and other exciting articles

For the first time -- and in unambiguous findings -- researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. - See more at: http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2008/03/burmangender.html#sthash.ni29a3Q7.dpuf

Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, summarizes a decade's worth of research in this article. He concludes that laughter is primarily a social vocalization that binds people together. It is a hidden language that we all speak. It is not a learned group reaction but an instinctive behavior programmed by our genes. Laughter bonds us through humor and play. He also explores gender differences in regard to the role of laughter in communication, also laughter as a tool in romance/pair-bonding.

"Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others... Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students' major."

"Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female. ... The semantic variations are part of a nascent effort worldwide to acknowledge some sort of neutral ground between male and female, starting at the youngest ages. ... Some colleges, too, are starting to adopt nongender language."

Article explores the etiquette of appropriate pronouns to use with genderqueer individuals. Language changes to reflect changing societal norms.

Just having a feminine voice means you're probably not as capable at your job. At least, studies suggest, that's what many people in the United States think. There's a gender bias in how Americans perceive feminine voices: as insecure, less competent and less trustworthy.

Singular "they," the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening. In a landslide vote, the language experts chose singular they over "thanks, Obama," ammosexual, "on fleek," and other contenders for this annual award given to the most significant term or word in the past year. Singular they, which The Washington Post officially adopted in its Style guide in 2015, is already a common habit in American speech. An example: "Everyone wants their cat to succeed." Earlier, the so-called proper way to say it would have been, "Everyone wants his or her cat to succeed."But what gave this word new prominence was its usefulness as a way to refer to people who don't want to be called "he" or "she." "We know about singular they already - we use it everyday without thinking about it, so this is bringing it to the fore in a more conscious way, and also playing into emerging ideas about gender identity," said linguist Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who presided over the voting this Friday afternoon.

This article helps people who don't understand or think they understand what "feminism" is, to truly understand it. Listed in this article are a variety of words with definitions and some examples. Understanding the definitions of these words may help in a better understanding of the missions of the feminists and what they are up against.

Good summary of general trends in language use by people with different states of mind, gender, class

This is very useful for the suicide note we tried to figure out in medium

Choosing a voice has implications for design, branding or interacting with machines. A voice can change or harden how we see each other. Research suggests that users prefer a younger, female voice for their digital personal assistant. We don't just need that computerized voice to meet our expectations, said Justine Cassell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. We need computers to relate to us and put us at ease when performing a task. "We have to know that the other is enough like us that it will run our program correctly," she said. That need seems to start young. Ms. Cassell has designed an avatar of indeterminate race and gender for 5-year-olds. "The girls think it's a girl, and the boys think it's a boy," she said. "Children of color think it's of color, Caucasians think it's Caucasian." Another system Cassell built spoke in what she termed "vernacular" to African-American children, achieving better results in teaching scientific concepts than when the computer spoke in standard English. When tutoring the children in a class presentation, however, "we wanted it to practice with them in 'proper English.' Standard American English is still the code of power, so we needed to develop an agent that would train them in code switching," she said. And, of course, there are regional issues to consider when creating a robotic voice. Many companies, such as Apple, have tweaked robotic voices for localized accents and jokes.

Researchers found that people tend to rate discoveries that came about "like a light bulb" as more exceptional than those that are "nurtured like seeds." These two metaphors are often used to describe scientific discovery and what we perceive as genius. Along with them come ingrained, subconscious associations that may have unintended consequences, according to a study published Friday in Social Psychological and Personality Science. Also, those metaphors had different effects depending on the gender of the idea's creator.

This article is about how the pronoun "they" has been used more frequently to refer to someone who identifies as non-gender binary. I find it interesting that now society has been more accepting of the LGBTQ community in recent years more than in the past. "They" is used as a gender-neutral pronoun.

This article focuses on the differences and similarities of Romance languages, and gives examples. It's pretty short and an interesting read

A quick 1 minute listen or read on the debate over whether or not COVID-19 is feminine or masculine in the French language.

This article addresses the controversy behind swearing around kids. There was a linguist who used to be a massive swearer, but he noticed that his linguistic tendencies and language style changed once he had kids. He decided to do a study with college students regarding their responses to swearing in lectures (since swearing around kids would be considered unethical). He addressed two types of profanity in this study; swearing and slurs. He found that slurs generated a negative reaction to the people at whom the slurs were about (Black people, gay people, etc.), but cussing didn't have an impact.

This article explains the controversy behind swearing around kids. A professor from UC San Diego explored this topic due to his own self interest. As a lover of profanity, he seems to have seen himself change his language while being around his own kids. In a experiment conducted on college students, he came across profanity as slurs and cussing. Slurs created a negative reaction to those that the slurs were about that consisted of gender preferences and skin color, but swearing didn't seem to show.