I am currently examining how differing levels of genderisation across languages (French, Finnish, and Norwegian) affects self-perception and the social perception of others through the utilisation of cognitive experiments. As a part of this, I would like to examine how individualistic markers impact on the main effect.
As fully gendered languages (and semi-gendered languages to a lesser degree) utilise gendered forms (normally the masculine) for generic role descriptors I thought it would be prudent to attempt to measure linguistic conservatism to examine the level to which, for example, an individual who was found to believe that men are better suited to generic roles referred to in the masculine form than women was influenced more strongly by linguistic conservativism stating that the masculine form should refer to men compared to the influence of explicit or implicit sexism.
I have been attempting to find such a measure but have had no success thus far; all the scales I have seen for examining linguistic conservativism seem to be designed for literature analysis, and so are not able to be utilised in my research. I am considering utilising specific items from the Instrument to measure Attitudes Towards Sexist/Nonsexist Lanugage that could be considered to indicate linguistic conservativism (e.g. 'we should not change the way that [language] has traditionally been written and spoken'), but was wondering whether there were any specific tools that have been designed for this purpose, or whether anyone knew of any other scales from which items can be selected that suit this purpose more closely?
