A Study On Sexism In English Vocabularyand Its Social Causes

Language is a mirror reflecting social life, and the social values are determinative to people's language uses. It is clearly observable that the use of English contains sexism. Sexism is a type of unfair cognition which is caused by several factors within the society and is reflected in what people normally do in their life, therefore resulting in the sexist language uses. No matter how the society develops, people's distinguishing man and woman will not seem to cease, which causes this topic to remain there among social science scholars. The purpose of this dissertation is, by studying and analyzing the sexist English vocabulary, which helps to find the causes to this language phenomenon, to understand the influence from the society to language uses, and to explore methods that to some extent reduce the sexism in the society.There are 5 chapters in the dissertation. Chapter One briefly introduces the relationship between language and sexism and the existing researches about this topic, and afterwards puts forward the objective of this thesis. Chapter Two analyzes the sexist English vocabulary from the perspective of markedness in the composition of the words. The third chapter probes into the etymology of the English vocabulary and puts forward possible explanations to the occurrence of sexist English vocabulary. The fourth chapter studies the social causes of the sexism in the English vocabulary which perpetuate such discriminatory cognition, including religion, education and media, which are the closest and the most influential to people's daily life. The fifth chapter is the conclusion and in this chapter effective strategies to eliminate social sexism are raised.