Sexist Language

There is a quote from Rita Mae Brown saying “Language is the road map of a culture”. It has, indeed, such a gargantuan impact that it has infused all facets of people’s lives, ranging from how they talk, how they behave to how they form their perception. Nevertheless, as the existence and evolution of a language is deeply intertwined with the social attitudes of human beings, their socio-cultural behaviors and viewpoints are mirrored in their utilization of the language. It is highly likely that the embodiment together with the dissemination of the relations of power is inevitable. That is, dominant groups within cultures have created prejudices in language disparaging and belittling certain groups within society. In this paper, the issue …show more content…
Instances of this are abundant, ranging from “chairman” to “fireman”. According to Gygax, Gabriel, Sarrasin, Oakhill, & Garnham, 2008; Hamilton, 1988; Moulton, Robinson, & Elias,1978; Ng, 1990; Stahlberg, Sczesny & Braun, 2001, people have a strong tendency to imagine male pronoun referents whenever masculine generic language is mentioned. Thus, there is no denying that the very first images associated with these words abovementioned are likely to men. Goddard and Patterson share the same way of thinking, deeming English as a gender exclusive language based on three factors. The first one is due to the fact that it constitutes sex-exclusive lexis like hunk for man and chick for women. Second, it is made up of linguistic items that stay unchanged but alter in meaning regarding the sexes such as the word “tramp”. The final element is that it is the language carrying within it a mutual acknowledgement about how men and women are supposed to conduct themselves and the traits that they are supposed to have (34). Piercey (Vol1) is also a proponent of this notion, stating that English is inherently sexist in its nature. In a few words, sexist language can be defined as the language excluding, trivializing or diminishing either gender (Doyle, 1998; Hegarty, Watson, Fletcher, & McQueen, 2011; Kitto, 2011; Parks & Roberton, 2004). Although there is a …show more content…
One predominant way is to create a non-sexist language, which can come in different names such as gender-inclusive or gender-fair language. Further efforts have also been made by the American Psychological Association and other organizations which currently forbid the use of gender biased pronouns and terms in articles submitted to their journals (American Psychological Association, 2009). Nonetheless, in spite of these endeavors, the application of sexist language continues to prevail (Hellinger & Bußmann, 2001). A typical illustration of this is set in the workplace where subtle or low level sexism is still disseminated as office jokes. This definitely inhibits women’s development and needs stopping as soon as possible. To make the matter worse, gender-biased language is still widely utilized in the media despite being said to be reducing in English academic writing (Carlin & Winfrey, 2009). Programmes aimed to boost the usage of gender-inclusive language have not been able to record “short-term impact” on either men’s or women’s language use (Prentice, 1994, p.15). Given how persistent sexist language is, it comes as a surprise that the so little research has investigated the exact reason why people employ it (Stahlberg et al., 2007). On the one hand, one possible interpretation may be that it is much less complicated to use sexist language like masculine generics to talk about