Sexism and Cognizing the relation between grammatical gender and cultural categories in the German and Russian languages from the perspective of cultural linguistics

The purpose of this article is to identify and analyze the effect of cultural categories as an effective factor in the development and determination of grammatical gender in languages having grammatical gender. The category under consideration in this study is the category of tools as a very ancient category in human history. For this purpose, 330 common tools in German and Russian were examined in terms of grammatical gender. In this particular case, the Chi-square test showed a significant difference in the frequency of females in the instruments between the two languages; with a statistic of 9.332 and significance level of 0.002. Therefore, based on the theoretical framework used in this study, namely cultural linguistics, it was found that the cultural identity of the German speakers towards "woman", from the perspective of the above said framework, is more gendered and instrumental than the Russian speakers. This study did not have a diachronic approach and all analyzes were presented synchronically. A closer examination of cultural categories can explain much more complex issues of a linguistic community's culture or their cultural cognition and recognize cultural linguistics as a valid framework for linguistic research. It is obvious that the hypothesis raised in this study needs to be tested on a larger number of languages having grammatical gender to obtain the scientific validity of a theory.