Male Dominance and Cultural Extinction
Abstract
Nearly half of all known languages in the world are under threat of extinction or are already extinct. What are the determinants of language extinction? In this paper, we uncover a relationship between a society’s deep-rooted gender norms and its language’s risk of extinction: languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction compared to those from male-dominant societies. We measure language status and male dominance using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index (Guarnieri and Tur-Prats, 2023), respectively, for a sample of 4,750 languages in 172 countries. Our results show that the negative relationship between male dominance and language extinction holds even after accounting for fundamental determinants of economic development and societal collapse at the language-group level, such as geography, conflict exposure, climate variability, and historical factors, as well as after the inclusion of country fixed effects. We then investigate the impact of inter-group relationships in the context of colonialism by relating each indigenous group to its colonizer in a dyadic setting. Our study shows that societies with more gender-equal norms than those of their colonizers are significantly more prone to language extinction. Cultural distance in gender norms from the colonizer is a stronger predictor of language extinction.
About Eleonora Guarnieri
Eleonora Guarnieri is an assistant professor at the University of Bristol, School of Economics, and a CESifo Research Network Affiliate. Her research investigates the fundamental determinants of violence and conflict, with a particular focus on cultural norms.
Language
English
This is a free Seminar. Registration is mandatory.