Language and Sexism

A.   Language in Society

1.    Language

     a)  Language not only reflects but also transmits and reinforces stereotypes and             roles historically considered appropriate for women and men in a society.

b) Language cannot be obscene or clean; attitudes toward specific words or linguistic expressions reflect the views of a culture or society toward the behaviors and actions of the language users.

2.    Sexism

a)  Language reflects sexism. It reflects any societal attitude, positive or negative; languages are infinitely flexible and expressive.

b) Language is not intrinsically racist or sexist but reflects the views of various sectors of a society.

3.    Language and Sexism

a)  Sexist language is considered to be any language that is supposed to include all people, but, unintentionally (or not) excludes a gender—this can be either males or females.

b)  A look at linguistic sexism is finding out the relationship between language and gender.

4.    Sexism in other language

a)  The problem with sexism in English go way beyond questions of vocabulary sexism is built into the way the language is structured, and the very concepts each of us uses to describe ideas about language.

b)  English it is a language that carries within it a shared understanding about how men and women are meant to be have and the characteristics they are meant to possess.

c)    Countries, such as Sweden, are adding gender-neutral pronouns to their dictionaries. Universities in the United States such as Yale are favoring gender-neutral terms by replacing terms such as “freshmen” and “upperclassmen” with “first-year” and “upper-level” students. 

B.   Marked and Unmarked Forms

1.    Unmarked Forms

a) Between male and female terms in many languages in which there are male/female pairs of words.

b)   The male form is generally unmarked and the female term is created by adding a bound morpheme.

2.    Marked Forms

a)  The marked terms are used to emphasize the female gender. (A rare exception to this is the unmarked word widow for a woman with a deceased husband but widower for a man with a deceased wife.)

b)  Using marked terms can give a specific tone and connotation of disapproval. They imply negativity and are derogatory towards women.

3.    Special Affixes

a)  Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that the way a language encodes different categories like male and female subtly affects the way speakers of the language think about those categories.

b)  The fact that nouns require special affixes to make them feminine forces people to think in terms of male and female, with the female somehow more derivative because of affixing.

c)  The availability of offensive terms, and particular grammatical peculiarities such as the lack of a genderless third-person singular pronoun, may perpetuate and reinforce biased views and be demeaning and insulting to those addressed.

4.    Language and gender

a) Language and gender, is an interdisciplinary field of research that studies varieties of speech (and, to a lesser extent, writing) in terms of gender, gender relations, gendered practices, and sexuality.

C.   Sociolinguistics

1.           Analysis

a)   The study of language in relation to society.

b) The branch of linguistics that is concerned with investigating, disclosing and ascertaining the relations of language to varied aspects of society.

c) Sociolinguists deal with a shift from the over weaning preoccupation with structure and setting to the communicative purpose of the speech act.