Social Gender in a Language Without Grammatical Gender: Relational and Status Encoding in Kazakh Female Nominations

Abstract

This article examines how Social Gender is organized in Kazakh in the absence of grammatical gender. The study is based on a lexicographically verified corpus of Kazakh female nominations, supplemented by a limited contrastive set of gender-neutral and male-linked kinship terms. The material includes basic female reference terms, kinship and affinal nominations, status-hierarchical designations, evaluative and address forms, socially conferred female roles, widowhood and step-relation terms, as well as analytic constructions marking age and social personhood. Methodologically, the analysis combines lexical-semantic, linguistic-anthropological, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic approaches within a framework that distinguishes Linguistic Gender, Natural Gender, and Social Gender. The results show that Kazakh female nominations form a structured lexico-pragmatic subsystem in which female reference intersects with relationality, hierarchy, evaluation, politeness, speaker dependence, and personhood-related distinctions. The analysis further demonstrates that this subsystem is not uniformly gender-differentiated: alongside female-specific nominations, Kazakh also employs selectively gender-neutral kinship terms and classificatory extensions, revealing where gender salience is strengthened, backgrounded, or redistributed. Social Gender in Kazakh is thus encoded not through grammatical agreement, but through a distributed system of relational, status-based, evaluative, politeness-based, speaker-dependent, and age/personhood-related nominations.