Gender Equality in Language Use

The search for gender equality in language use is one of the most frequently cited cases of linguistic democratization (e.g., Farrelly & Seoane 2012:394). At the grammatical level, this process implies, for example, that pronouns such as generic he used with epicene antecedents are being replaced by singular they or by combined he or she, at least in inner-circle varieties of English. However, outer-circle varieties remain underexplored in this regard. For this reason, this paper analyzes three Asian English varieties, namely Hong Kong English (HKE), Indian English (IndE), and Singapore English (SgE), based on the relevant ICE corpora. More than 58,000 examples were retrieved from the corpora and manually filtered, resulting in 2120 tokens of epicene pronouns. The results show a very different picture for each variety. While overall HKE shows a high preference for the more democratic options they and he or she, IndE and SgE exhibit different patterns. IndE shows singular they in speech, but it is almost non-existent in writing, while in SgE there is a sharp contrast between the most spontaneous spoken register and all other registers. After testing different hypotheses, the findings are explained in socio-cultural terms, as a result of democratization possibly related to women’s movements in those territories.

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The Shifting Sub-Text of Japanese Gendered Language

The GLOCAL in Asia 2020 ◽

10.47298/cala2020.12-2 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Mary Goebel Noguchi ◽

Keyword(s):

Older Women ◽

Gender Equality ◽

School System ◽

Language Use ◽

Japanese Society ◽

Gender Issues ◽

Teachers Union ◽

Legal Code ◽

The Past ◽

Over Time

Sociolinguists (Holmes 2008; Meyerhof 2006) assists to describe the Japanese language a having gender exclusive elements. Personal pronouns, sentence-ending particles and lexicon used exclusively by one gender have been cataloged in English by researchers such as Ide (1979), Shibamoto (1985) and McGloin (1991). While there has been some research showing that Japanese women’s language use today is much more diverse than these earlier descriptions suggested (e.g. studies in Okamoto and Smith 2004) and that some young Japanese girls use masculine pronouns to refer to themselves (Miyazaki 2010), prescriptive rules for Japanese use still maintain gender-exclusive elements. In addition, characters in movie and TV dramas not only adhere to but also popularize these norms (Nakamura 2012). Thus, Japanese etiquette and media ‘texts’ promote the perpetuation of gender-exclusive language use, particularly by females. However, in the past three decades, Japanese society has made significant shifts towards gender equality in legal code, the workplace and education. The researcher therefore decided to investigate how Japanese women use and view their language in the context of these changes. Data comes from three focus groups. The first was conducted in 2013 and was composed of older women members of a university human rights research group focused on gender issues. The other two were conducted in 2013 and 2019, and were composed of female university students who went through the Japanese school system after the Japan Teachers’ Union adopted a policy of gender equality, thus expressing interest in gender issues. The goal was to determine whether Japanese women’s language use is shifting over time. The participants’ feelings about these norms were also explored - especially whether or not they feel that the norms constrain their ability to express themselves fully. Although the new norms are not yet evident in most public contexts, the language use and views of the participants in this study represent the sub-text of this shift in Japanese usage.

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Linguistic Competence in Aphasia

Perspectives on Augmentative and Alternative Communication ◽

10.1044/aac17.3.87 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 17 (3) ◽

pp. 87-92

Author(s):

Leonard L. LaPointe

Keyword(s):

Language Use ◽

Linguistic Competence ◽

Careful Study ◽

Feral Children ◽

Performance Factors ◽

Performance Loss ◽

Linguistic Rules ◽

Communication Goals ◽

Aphasia Treatment ◽

And Performance

Abstract Loss of implicit linguistic competence assumes a loss of linguistic rules, necessary linguistic computations, or representations. In aphasia, the inherent neurological damage is frequently assumed by some to be a loss of implicit linguistic competence that has damaged or wiped out neural centers or pathways that are necessary for maintenance of the language rules and representations needed to communicate. Not everyone agrees with this view of language use in aphasia. The measurement of implicit language competence, although apparently necessary and satisfying for theoretic linguistics, is complexly interwoven with performance factors. Transience, stimulability, and variability in aphasia language use provide evidence for an access deficit model that supports performance loss. Advances in understanding linguistic competence and performance may be informed by careful study of bilingual language acquisition and loss, the language of savants, the language of feral children, and advances in neuroimaging. Social models of aphasia treatment, coupled with an access deficit view of aphasia, can salve our restless minds and allow pursuit of maximum interactive communication goals even without a comfortable explanation of implicit linguistic competence in aphasia.

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