A Comparative Study Of Gender Bias In Chinese And English Proverbs

Language is the product of society and carrier of culture, mirroring the characteristics of a nation, people's attitudes to life, concepts of value and ways of thinking; all kinds of social phenomena ( including gender bias) are bound to be reflected in language. Language, to a great extent, reflects such social phenomena: females are defamed, belittled, and layed in the position of being subordinate to males. A major issue in sociolinguistic studies has been the relationship between gender and language. Since 1960s, the rising of the feminist movements has further promoted the research of gender language.As essence and important part of language and carrier of culture, proverbs can reflect people's perspectives and systems of society. The bias against women in society is reflected in proverbs, which influence the social concept greatly. Thus, proverbs are more representative and persuasive to be used to probe into the gender bias in language.People in different nations have common ground in experience and concepts, so proverbs in different cultures have inevitable coincidence. From the five aspects (status, marriage, words, wisdom and disposition, troublemakers), the paper makes use of quite a few examples indicating such gender bias both in Chinese and English proverbs : men are superior to women; women are subordinate to men; men work outside while women are in charge of housework; men are stronger than women. The proverbs in this thesis reflect the life of women and display different discriminated images of women: women are regarded as " chatterbox", "weak or frail", "without wisdom", "capricious" and "evil". The thesis also illustrates its influences on society and tries to investigate into the causes of this phenomenon in the view of sociolinguistics. It aims to expose the gender bias in language, enhance people's awareness of it and have a better understanding of the relationship between language and society. It also sets forth the fact that proverbs in different cultures have much similarities in the bias against women and is expected to be able to provide help for further study in the future as well.