Reconstructing gender ideologies of English loanwords in Chinese

This article explores how English loanwords appropriated into Chinese are not merely linguistic adaptations but need to be understood as ideologically influenced processes of nativization (i.e. Chinesization). It focuses particularly on how traditional gender ideologies are re-constructed through examining the following aspects of gender assignment in English loanwords: gender associations in personal names, gender metaphor, gender visualization, and gender markers. Based on examples of loanwords representing these aspects of gender assignment, we find that gender feature values often change as English words are nativized into Chinese, and further, we find that such gender assignments often strengthen rather than resist traditional ideologies of gender in Chinese.