by Rajrishi Das

German is a remarkably logical language. Unlike English, it is pronounced phonetically, with no silent letters or exceptions in pronunciation. It has clear rules for declension and verb conjugation, and there are three grammatical genders.

Gender assignment, however, is German’s most glaring area of irregularity. As Mark Twain once famously complained, it is a language in which the translation of the word ‘turnip’ (‘die Rübe’) is defined to be feminine, while ‘the girl’ translates to ‘das Mädchen,’ a noun of gender neutrality. Its three genders are often assigned to nouns with ambiguous reasoning, and they seem to have little correlation with modern societal views of gender.

But to native German speakers, the language’s inconsistencies aren’t a common topic of discussion; its ‘flaws,’ if recognized as such, go mainly uncommented upon in the dialect’s daily usage. By labelling words and concepts with the articles der, die or das, the German language outlines the intellectual space that various ideas occupy and defines its speakers’ lingual connotations of gender. To the German speaker, the terms for ‘kitchen’ and ‘woman’ are perpetually linked in their language, regardless of their personal views on gender roles, expectations or stereotypes.

When I started learning German, I bought into its gendered philosophy. I didn’t do so explicitly—rather, I made subconscious associations between various concepts. I followed the lingual guidelines I was being taught and categorized nouns as masculine, feminine or neuter.

The first day of my freshman year in high school, I walked into my German class barely capable of speaking coherent English. My nerves rushed my thoughts, muffled my words and highlighted my lisp. So, when the ancient and jovial teacher, Herr Schuster decided we should introduce ourselves to the class, my vision blurred and my words slurred, and a wave of nausea came over my body.

“I’mRaj,I’mfromNashua,NewHampshire,” I mumbled, drunk with apprehension. I lowered my eyes and studied my shoelaces.

My classmates responded with blank stares, and a surge of heat came over my face. I repeated myself, louder this time, and glanced up at the classroom.

That term, my German class was overwhelmingly white and male. Of the nine students in the class, I was the only student of color, and I counted just two girls. I was one of two freshmen, and after my first day, I was terrified of the class. But not only that, I was mostly afraid of the overwhelming, pedantic German language.

As time passed, I began to bond with my peers despite our differences. We shared common struggles in learning der Akkusativ or in pop quizzes on nouns’ genders or verb conjugation. The older students took me under their wing and helped me adjust to boarding school life.

After a few weeks, I finally knew everyone by name. There was Will, the drowsy, good-natured senior who kept sleeping through class; there was Alexander, who came from St. Petersburg; and then there were the two girls, Sophia and Alex. Every day, we spoke broken German together. Our class was united in our struggles with collective American inflection.

As I grew more comfortable with German’s various tenses and grammatical gender rules, I also started to see the unspoken differences between us all.

On one bright November morning, Herr Schuster taught us about the German household.

“In families, siblings, or sometimes close friends, give each other nicknames.” He articulated each word with perfekter, nativer Deutsch, and we absorbed his words into our burgeoning vocabularies. “For boys, I might call Raj ‘der Raj,’ since we are very good friends.” Herr Schuster flashed me a wink.

“For girls, it is very simple – we say, ‘die Sophia,’ or perhaps, ‘die Alex.’ This way, we can tell between ‘der Alex,’” he continued, gesturing towards Alexander, “or ‘die Alex.” He gestured towards Alex, and I saw flashes of red appear in her cheeks.

Alex and I were friends, but although I never mentioned it to her face, I had always noticed something different about her. She always wore men’s clothes, for one, complete with the button-down dress-shirt and a tie. She spoke in a deep voice, for a girl. She cut her hair short and cropped the sides, like Cristiano Ronaldo. I always assumed her name to be short for Alexis, or something like that: a girl’s name.

After class that day, I saw her get up and confront Herr Schuster, but he returned her whispers with a blank, unseeing stare. He had taught German for 40 years; he was too entrenched in the language to understand the harm he caused with his words.

For the rest of the term, my classmates and I walked into the classroom every morning, as per usual, and went about our typical Deutsch Smalltalk. We wished each other ‘Guten Morgen,’ we asked each other ‘Wie geht es dir?’ and when we took attendance, we looked around and told Herr Schuster that ‘der Will ist wahrscheinlich noch im Bett,’ or that ‘die Alex ist krank,’ and that she was in the Health Center.

It wasn’t until a health class during the spring of my freshman year that I first heard the terms ‘gender expression’, ‘gender spectrum’ or ‘gender fluidity.’ I never learned their German translations.

Through my language in our German class, I had robbed Alex of his identity. Despite his efforts to express his gender as male, I was too stuck in my ways, too close-minded and too entrenched in my self-imposed prisons of oppressive language. In English and German, I had always referred to Alex with the incorrect pronouns—my words outlined the intellectual space in which I considered his identity, and I was complicit in defining the hostile, gendered societal environment that infringed upon Alex’s personhood.

As members of society, our words hold crucial weight. It is through the usage and spread of language that societal values are developed and maintained, and it is through the language surrounding us that our identities are shaped. When we, as individuals, use language to express the association of negative connotations with others’ identities, we contribute to the perpetuation of hostile, bigoted and oppressive environments.

I did not intend to subject Alex to discrimination. He is my friend, and I hold no hatred towards any aspect of his identity. But when I failed to consider the implications of my language, I upheld our society’s systems of oppression.

Logic implies that sticks and stones break our bones, but society isn’t defined by logic. It is through our language that society defines our identities; it is our language that has the power to inflict and heal wounds. In choosing our words, we choose whether to uplift or hold down the oppressed.

Let’s speak carefully.