A Study On Sexism In The English Language

As a phenomenon of society, language reflects all the sides of human societynaturally. Sexism is a kind of discrimination by one sex against the other, especiallyby males against females. Applied to language, this biased representation of the sexesconcerns the portrayal of men as the norm and women as the appendage or as theexception in language, which is often called linguistic sexism or androcentrism──one of the main contents for sociolinguistics and a major subject of feminist linguistsin the late 1970s and early 1980s. Sexism, a study on the gender/sex of language, has been carried on after thediscovery of linguistic asymmetry, theoretically based on Sapir-Whorf Hypothesiswhich has a great influence on the research of the relationship between language andculture. It states that the meanings which people ascribe to language influence theirinterpretations of it. Language affects their perceptions of reality and, ultimately, theways in which they see themselves and the world, which is also known as thelinguistic relativity──a theory established for the study on sexism in language. The thesis focuses on the linguistic features of sexism from the angles ofmorphological, lexical and semantic asymmetry. Methods such as comparison,statistics, induction and deduction, description and explanation, synchronic anddiachronic approaches are employed to obtain the results. According to the relevanttheory of linguistics from the angles of language and society, language and culture,the thesis, indebted a lot to the previous research, traces the reasons for the occurrenceof sexism in English from the historical, social and cultural perspectives, thenexplains the necessity of changing sexist language according to the relationshipbetween language and reality. A large space of the thesis is devoted to discussing the current trends fornon-sexist language. The feminist movement, also called the women's movement orthe women's liberation movement, undoubtedly has been and still is one of the majorsocial movements of this century. As a result of this movement, there is a growingawareness of sexism in language, which has been shown in the current trends ofsexism in English─gender neutralization. Throughout this thesis, a large number of concrete and illustrative examples areincluded to show the viewpoints more scientifically and logically.