Women's Role In The Society-as Refelcted In The Use Of English Language

Sexism is a kind of discrimination by one sex against the other especially by males against females. Applied to language, this biased representation concerns the portrayal of men as the norm and women as the appendage or as the exception in language. Since the late 1960s, feminism as a social movement striving for the liberation of women and the equality of sexes has made a great impact on the study of language in a variety of ways. It has triggered the interest of some linguists in examining the different ways in which languages represent and treat women and men ---- a research that became known as the study of sexism in the use of language.Based on the theories of linguistics, especially feminist linguistics, this thesis is trying to analyze the sexist phenomenon in the use of English language with practical examples to aim at foregrounding those hidden differences in the representation and treatment of women and men from the perspective of women's role in the society. According to the recent study on language and society as well as language and culture, this thesis also illustrates the reasons for the occurrence of sexism from the historical, social, cultural and religious perspectives, thus demonstrates the need for language planning (LP) in order to eliminate sexist language usage and eventually promotes women's social status. However, the elimination of linguistic sexism experienced lots of difficulties or barriers in the process of performance. Although the mass media as well as the circulation of non-discriminatory guidelines or recommendations have contributed lots of efforts in eliminating sexist language, and some reforms have been taken place in workplace due to the promotion of female social status, but we cannot overlook that the phenomenon of sexism is still an unsolved problem, because the change of linguistic sexism actually lies in the change of society and it takes a long time for human beings to change the social structure. On the other hand, with the raise of women's social status, women's language, which is regarded as powerless, is used by men for expressing powerful meanings. Therefore, I illustrate examples to prove my hypothesis that the gap between men's language and women's language is becoming narrower and narrower. And since English language has a long historical background, any excessive LP will make lose of the traditional language culture.