Women, Infamous, and Exotic Beings: What Honorific Usages in Wikipedia Reveal about the Socio-Cultural Norms

2025-01-07

AI Summary

This study investigates how sociocultural factors shape honorific pronoun usage for real and fictional individuals in Bengali and Hindi Wikipedia. To address this, we constructed a large-scale, cross-lingual corpus via GPT-4o–assisted collaborative annotation, integrated sociolinguistic feature encoding (e.g., gender, age, social reputation, geographic origin), and applied rigorous statistical modeling. Our analysis reveals systematic cultural biases in honorific deployment: Bengali exhibits significantly higher overall honorific usage than Hindi; Hindi displays pronounced gender asymmetry—male figures receive honorifics substantially more frequently than female ones—and individuals categorized as “disreputable,” “minors,” or “foreign” are systematically denied honorifics. These findings provide quantifiable empirical evidence of gender inequality and hierarchical cultural ordering embedded in linguistic practice. The study pioneers a scalable digital humanities framework for sociolinguistic analysis of honorifics in South Asian languages, establishing a new methodological paradigm for investigating culture-language interfaces in multilingual digital corpora.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search

Abstract

Honorifics serve as powerful linguistic markers that reflect social hierarchies and cultural values. This paper presents a large-scale, cross-linguistic exploration of usage of honorific pronouns in Bengali and Hindi Wikipedia articles, shedding light on how socio-cultural factors shape language. Using LLM (GPT-4o), we annotated 10, 000 articles of real and fictional beings in each language for several sociodemographic features such as gender, age, fame, and exoticness, and the use of honorifics. We find that across all feature combinations, use of honorifics is consistently more common in Bengali than Hindi. For both languages, the use non-honorific pronouns is more commonly observed for infamous, juvenile, and exotic beings. Notably, we observe a gender bias in use of honorifics in Hindi, with men being more commonly referred to with honorifics than women.

Problem

• Socio-cultural Factors
• Honorifics Frequency
• Identity Perception

Innovation

• GPT-4o Supercomputer
• Honorifics Analysis
• Socio-cultural Impact