Prospects and challenges of gender neutralization in Russian

Feminist linguistic activism has gained prominence among Western feminists as a way to eliminate sexism in language and everyday life. In Russian, gender specification (known as feminitivy) represents the mainstream approach practiced by grassroots feminist reformers. However, alternative approaches aimed at gender neutralization proliferate. The paper examines the prospects and challenges of gender neutralization both in writing and oral speech. Results of a survey documenting attitudes of Russian-speaking feminist and LGBTQI communities to language reform attempts are presented, with a special focus on comparison between gender specification and gender neutralization.

Sexism in Language: A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

Language plays a crucial role in perpetuating sexism and gender inequality. The research draws on the Critical Discourse Analysis, an Interdisciplinary Approach to the study of discourse that views language as a social practice, to explore the existence and nature of sexist language in Kamba Popular Songs. Specifically, this study anchored itself on Grice’s Second Theory of Conversational Implicature (1991). The research had two objectives: to investigate sexist implicatures in Kamba Popular Songs and describe sexist inferences in the lyrics. The study used the descriptive research design and purposively sampled eight songs from the ten most popular Kamba bands with the youths. Besides, the research used content analysis to identify the possible sexist expressions classified into implicatures and inferences. Further, the researcher categorized the two linguistic items into negative and positive sexism, and the number of each type was counted up and described. The study concludes that popular Kamba songs project a sexist perception of women. This research recommends eliminating sexist language in both written and spoken discourse because it contains a lexicon and grammatical structure that trivializes and perpetrates biases against women.

Sexism in Language and Talk-in-Interaction

© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. Feminists have long recognised important relationships between language and a gendered social order that disadvantages women. At the establishment of gender and language as a field of academic inquiry, work documented sexism in language—the ways words were used to ignore, narrowly define, or demean women. Using feminist conversation analysis, this article further develops that early work by considering recorded instances of gender and sexism in talk. A broad notion of “gender trouble” was used to identify 50 relevant cases from everyday interactions. Two sexist language issues that were evident in the collection are presented in this article—the derogation of women and participants’ orientations to gender inclusiveness. The analysis contributes to a better understanding of sexism in language by examining how instances of it unfold over turns of talk. The study is discussed with respect to the methodological tensions inherent in feminist conversation analysis.

Sexism in Language and Talk-in-Interaction

© 2015, © The Author(s) 2015. Feminists have long recognised important relationships between language and a gendered social order that disadvantages women. At the establishment of gender and language as a field of academic inquiry, work documented sexism in language—the ways words were used to ignore, narrowly define, or demean women. Using feminist conversation analysis, this article further develops that early work by considering recorded instances of gender and sexism in talk. A broad notion of “gender trouble” was used to identify 50 relevant cases from everyday interactions. Two sexist language issues that were evident in the collection are presented in this article—the derogation of women and participants’ orientations to gender inclusiveness. The analysis contributes to a better understanding of sexism in language by examining how instances of it unfold over turns of talk. The study is discussed with respect to the methodological tensions inherent in feminist conversation analysis.

On Gender Marking in the English Language

The paper is concerned with a diachronic study of gender marking in the English language. The study aims to trace the evolution of markers differentiating the grammatical category of gender. It is revealed that the decay of gender in the English language resulted from that of case inflections which used to be the distinct gender markers of Old English noun and adjective paradigms. The paper also examines linguistic and extralinguistic causes of the development of third-person pronouns which are referred to as the main gender markers in Modern English. Gender aspect of pronominal reference is viewed form a sociocultural perspective associated with attempts to eliminate sexism in language. In this regard, it is shown to what extent this tendency has influenced the meaning, forms and functioning of English pronouns.

Sexism in English Proverbs and Idioms

The study of “language and gender” has been always popular among linguistics. Language, as a mirror of the society, reflects a nation’s values and beliefs. Sexism against women has been common in English-speaking countries. So we can also see sexism in English here and there. Proverbs and idioms are blood and guts of a nation. This paper pays much attention to the sexism in English proverbs and idioms. This paper first discusses the preview studies about sexism and the definition of English proverbs and idioms; and then the thesis expounds the manifestations of sexism in proverbs and idioms from the perspectives of social status, wisdom, character, and marriage; then the paper also makes deep studies into the causes of sexism from three aspects: society, culture and psychology; finally, this paper indicates the development trend of sexism in English proverbs and idioms. Through the studies on English proverbs and idioms, this paper tries to reveal the phenomenon of sexism in language and find out solutions to help people reduce and eliminate discrimination against women in society and language.

Impact of Undergraduate Language and Gender Research: Challenges and Reflections in the Context of Qatar

The paper aims at raising female students’ awareness about sexism in language and designing and applying sociocultural linguistic interventions in Qatar. Contributing to the nascent feminist research tradition in this relatively new and rapidly up-and-coming country, it presents a tangible pedagogical proposal from the context of tertiary education. At the same time, in terms of its contribution to gender-related sociolinguistic theory this project can be seen as an attempt to offer a suggestion on how to theorise the positionality of sociolinguistic professionals in relation to issues and contexts they address.

Gender Bias and Sexism in Language

Language is one of the most powerful means through which sexism and gender discrimination are perpetrated and reproduced. The content of gender stereotypes, according to which women should display communal/warmth traits and men should display agentic/competence traits, is reflected in the lexical choices of everyday communication. As a consequence, language subtly reproduces the societal asymmetries of status and power in favor of men, which are attached to the corresponding social roles. Moreover, the hidden yet consensual norm according to which the prototypical human being is male is embedded in the structure of many languages. Grammatical and syntactical rules are built in a way that feminine terms usually derive from the corresponding masculine form. Similarly, masculine nouns and pronouns are often used with a generic function to refer to both men and women. However, such linguistic forms have the negative effects of making women disappear in mental representations. Although the use of gender-fair linguistic expressions can effectively prevent these negative consequences and promote gender equality, there are even more implicit forms of gender bias in language that are difficult to suppress. By choosing terms at different levels of abstraction, people can affect the attributions of the receiver in a way that is consistent with their stereotypical beliefs. Linguistic abstraction, thus, is a very subtle resource used to represent women in a less favorable way and thus to enact gender discrimination without meaning to discriminate or even be aware that this linguistic behavior has discriminatory results. In order to reduce gender bias, it is necessary to change people’s linguistic habits by making them aware of the beneficial effects of gender-fair expressions.