Linguistic Sexism And Language Reform

This thesis concerns the feminist impact on language, the most powerful means of communication and expression. It documents and discusses feminist language reform (LR): the efforts, the initiatives and actions that feminists, groups or committees engaged in the formulation and implementation take to change the biased representation of the sexes in language.I approach the description and the discussion of feminist LR from a language planning (LP) perspective. I hope to broaden the vision of those working in the field of LP by presenting feminist LR as a genuine case worthy of attention. To date the increasing literature on LP has largely ignored the issue of feminist LR. However, this form of LP has the tendency to contribute to a better understanding of the interaction between language, LP and social change.The thesis is structured around five chapters. The first part introduces the topic of feminism, the study of language and feminist language reform in a broad sense and provides some background information on the study of language, which should help the reader to place the study of feminist LR in the broader field of gender and language research. In Chapter 2, I explain the concept of LP in general and discuss the main features of feminist LP. I also outline the planning framework which I adopt in this thesis. Chapters 3 and 4 each discuss a major aspect or stage in the feminist LP/LR process. Chapter 3 also describes and discusses the many ways in which sexism is encoded in language. In Chapter 4, I raise the question'Should sexist language be changed?"and discuss some of the prominent views for and against any such change. The next question posed in this chapter'How should sexist language be changed?'assumes a positive answer to the previous question, and discusses the strategies and methods of feminist LR. Finally, there are some concluding remarks on the issue of feminist LR and ideas for further research and action.