Camilla Zabikhodjaeva

  

Volume 8 | Issue III | September 2024

Pleasantville High School ’25

New York, USA

  

Growing up, I transitioned from speaking Russian at home in an Uzbek family to using English in New York schools within hours. The routine shift in language and the cultural implications that came with it initially piqued my interest in sociolinguistics. I enhanced my understanding of international relations through leading the speech and debate team, serving as a global ambassador for a political youth nonprofit, and participating in my school’s French society; yet I continued to seek deeper academic investigation. When I learned that my mother country’s tongue, Uzbek, was a genderless language – one where pronouns only refer to singularity and plurality, free from the gendered implications set in most Western nations – a desire to more substantively explore the field festered within me. Becoming more aware of the gender divide present in the Western hemisphere with the SCOTUS overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, and simultaneously being engrossed by my French lessons at school, I endeavored to study French within the context of grammatical gender and linguistic sexism. I formally transitioned my personal interest into legitimate research upon commencing my AP Research course in September of last year. Prior to integrating feedback from The Schola, my work lacked depth. However, the revision process allowed me to solidify the basis of my conclusions, which highlighted the impact of grammatical gender on the underrepresentation of the feminine. In the future, I aspire for my work to enhance its complexity, laying potential stepping stones in the path to true gender equity globally.