Title: Male Dominance and Cultural Extinction (with Ana Tur-Prats)

Nearly half of all known languages in the world are under threat of extinction or are already extinct. What are the determinants of language extinction? In this paper, we uncover a relationship between a society’s deep-rooted gender norms and its language’s risk of extinction: languages from more gender-equal societies face a higher likelihood of extinction compared to those from male-dominant societies. We measure language status and male-dominance using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index (Guarnieri and Tur-Prats, 2023), respectively, for a sample of 4,763 languages in 172 countries. Our results show that the negative relationship between male dominance and language extinction holds even after accounting for fundamental determinants of economic development and societal collapse at the language-group level, such as geography, conflict exposure, climate variability, and historical factors, as well as after the inclusion of country fixed effects. We then investigate the impact of inter-group relationships in the context of colonialism by relating each indigenous group to its colonizer in a dyadic setting. We find that societies with more gender-equal norms than those of their colonizers are significantly more prone to language extinction. Cultural distance in gender norms from the colonizer is a stronger predictor of language extinction than the characteristics of either the colonizer or the indigenous group itself.