Russian culture (rather than grammatical gender) influences artistic personifications

International Journal of Language and Culture. 2025. Vol. 12. No. 2. P. 228–250.

Abdel-Raheem A., Tatiana Permyakova, Поздеева Е. В.

Can Russian grammatical gender influence an artist’s decisions in personification or conceptualization of abstract entities? This article aims to contribute to the scholarly literature on linguistic relativity, and re-examines the relationship between grammatical gender and patterns in thought and culture in the specific domain of art. The results presented in this paper support the notion that culture might have a tremendous effect that could entirely override any possible effect of language. Specifically, they show immediate androcentric bias — i.e., a strong effect for a male depiction (= a strong correspondence between personification in visual art and grammatical gender in Russian), but not for a female depiction.

Ключевые слова: metaphor, метафора, метонимия, visual arts, metonymy, personification, олицетворение, гипотеза лингвистической относительности, hypothesis of linguistic relativity, визуальное искусство, Russian grammatical gender, грамматический род в русском языке