Below Is A Excerpt Of A Paper/Research Topic Proposal I Recently Did For Class

Going through the alphabet sounds, what jumped out to me was not any of those aforementioned forms of classifications but that some letters seemed to have sound hard, forceful or dominant sounds while others seem to sound soft, passive or secondary. Those classifications reminded me of the stereotypical notions of masculinity vs. femininity. Thus, I decided to classify the alphabet into masculine letter sounds vs. feminine letter sounds. Below you can see a chart of where I placed each letter.
Masculine Letters                              Feminine Letters
B,D,F,G,K,L,M,O,P,R,S,T,W,Z                A,C,E,H,I,J,Q,U,V,X,Y

After I broke down the letters into masculine and feminine, I felt like it did not really give that much insight into the sonic qualities of the letter sounds because my opinion is arbitrary. That being said, I felt like I had an interesting concept so what I decided to do was to create a little survey. I had 6 of people classify the letters the same way based on whether they thought the sounds the letter made was more masculine or feminine in order to see if they was some sort of pattern. I did not say what I meant by masculine or feminine and I made sure that they knew I meant for them to classify the sound the letter made as opposed to the letter itself. Below is the chart that resulted from the data collected in my surveys.
Letter   Masculine Votes    Feminine Votes
A                        0                   6
B                        4                   2
C                        2                   4
D                        6                   0
E                        0                   6
F                        4                   2
G                        4                   2
H                        3                   3
I                         1                   5
J                         3                   3
K                        5                   1
L                         1                   5
M                        2                   4
N                        5                   1
O                        5                   1
P                         4                   2
Q                        1                   5
R                         6                   0
S                         1                   5
T                         5                   1
U                         3                   3
V                         3                   3
W                        2                   4
X                         5                   1
Y                         1                   5
Z                         5                   1

While my sample size is not big enough to draw any major conclusions, I do believe even with the small sample size that there are some interesting things in the data particularly when all 6 people called one letter sound either feminine or masculine. I would not be surprised that if a larger sample size for the survey where used if a letter like D was considered masculine a vast majority of the time or if a letter like E was thought of as feminine a vast majority of the time. This exercise could be used as a jumping off point to do a larger survey across different cultures/countries. It would be interesting to see on a larger scale if men and women classified letter sounds differently and in other alphabets and cultures if there were also sound that where associated with one gender or another. After that data was collected, some Meta analysis could be done comparing the how gender stratified people considered the alphabet vs. how strict the gender roles where in that particular culture.