Influence Of Sexism In Language

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Language is believed to affect one’s perception of the world. It is the means through which people shape their view of society, organize their knowledge, learn new things and assimilate the norms and social patterns of their community (Catalan, 2005). Language (He, 2010) serves as primary means of constructing and maintaining the society and its existence and development are closely linked with the social attitudes, views and values of human beings. Thus, the existence of sexist language is due to sexism in the society. Sexist language expresses bias in favor of one sex and thus treats the other sex in a discriminatory manner. In most cases the bias is in favor of men and against women (Lei, 2006). Such biases are deeply rooted on the historical state of women where they are seen as someone who stays at home, someone who is powerless and someone who is subordinate to men.
Furthermore, Mills (2008) explained that sexist language conveys negative and bias representation of women because it is based on the idea that male forms are the norm. Thus, represents women as deviant and …show more content…

She found that Gikuyu language is sexist where they represent or name the world from a masculine’s point of view. She was able to prove sexism in semantic collocation where words meaning may shift from being positive male to negative female. Sexist language was also evident in sex-paired words, personification and imagery, in the morphology of the language, syntax or the word order, and in the use of titles and non-parallel terms.
Studies on linguistic sexism did not only focus on the language but also how language is used in different texts like newspaper articles, textbooks and literary material. Demberg (2014), Animasahun (2015) and Laine & Watson (2014) focused their study on linguistic sexism in newspapers while Mehmood, et al (2014) on sample literary text and Perez-Sabater (2014) on

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