The Importance Of Sexism In Chinese Language

A language is a system of symbols, mostly words, that express certain meaning. As a generative structured system, the key element of language is to transmit a piece of information by combining symbols to generate a sentence with message involved in a moment. Its functionality not only allows human to communicate each other, but also passes on knowledge, ideas, value and thoughts. Moreover, language can affect human experience and perception since it is also a medium on memorizing and feeling. Language has power to influence our perceiving of the world. Certain terms of language are building up an unconscious bias on human without noticed. With its strong relationship with culture, it can even change human’s behavior. Based on these arguments,

Mere-exposure effect, also known as familiarity principle, is a psychological phenomenon describe that human tend to prefer and trust for things they are more familiar with. This effect has been demonstrated with different things including language. (Zajonc, R.B, 2001). The issue of linguistic sexism in Chinese language can demonstrate this argument. Except for normal words and terms, Chinese language contains lots of idioms with hidden meaning behind. Some of them are describing something in short. For example, “前功盡廢” means wasting all the previous effort, which is neutral terms. But few of them are discriminative terms based on traditional Chinese culture. Like “婦人之見”are the terms describing worthless views not to be taken seriously. This term itself is feminine although it is not specifically used for describing woman. If people are frequently using this term for express someone’s pointless opinion even regardless of gender, they will be unconsciously developed a negative sexual stereotyping image on woman under mere-exposure effect because of the feminine image of the term. That is one of the evidence show that language can affect the thought in a hidden

People would not think and behave differently just because they speak different language.” This is an argument underestimate that how language, especially the native language of people, plays an important role in shaping habitual thought though its impact on culture. According to the study (M. Keith Chen, 2013), it is found that the difference in how much money countries’ residents save is related by how their native speakers talk about the future. “Futured language” like English, have different tense to separate between the past, present and future while “futureless languages” like Chinese, explain the events with same phase regardless of time. The study revealed that there are large economic differences between these two types of speakers. Futureless language speakers tend to save 30 percent more in any given year than futured language speakers. When people talk about future as more distinct from the present, the more distant people feel and therefore they are less motivated to save money. Although this study does not show the direct causation between language and behavior, the data support the connection between language and saving culture among the world. While there were studies (Jackson, J. 2014) already show that language becomes strongly interwined with culture and habit during human’s socialization process. The system and tense of language create a default habitual response tendency and