A Study Of Gender Discrimination In English And Chinese Proverbs From The Perspective Of Sociolinguistics

As we all know, language is the mirror of our society, and is also the true reflection of the traditional styles of society, ethnic customs and cultural ideologies. With the deep researches and developments of sociolinguistics, anthropology, social psychology and other kinds of subjects, the relationships between language and gender have gradually become a hot topic of discussion. There is a great difference between human languages, and, at the same time, gender differences in languages may be the oldest form of human language difference. The different use of language between men and women has caused extensive concern, which is one of the most essential issues studied by the humanists and lingustics.In traditional ideology of our society, woman was usually considered to be a second-class citizen, whose social status was extremely low. With the rapid development of the feminist movement in the19th century, women have not only achieved the right to education and the right to work outside their houses equally to males, but also started to take notice of gender discrimination in languages and focus on correcting the linguistic discrimination based on gender.As the essence and a specific form of language, proverbs are the ideological production in given cultures, which are known as the concise generalizations of human experiences and intelligence in specific social environment. The well-known British writer William Penn once said that the wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs which are brief and pithy. Gibbs and Beitel assimilate proverbs to "the children of experience and the fruits of wisdom". About a quarter of people in the world speak Chinese, and Chinese is one of the oldest languages until present day. However, English is spoken worldwide and is one of the working languages in the United Nations and is also the international communicating language in practice. Therefore, from the perspective of English and Chinese proverbs, the studies on gender discrimination have broadly representative and powerful persuasion. From the feminist point of view, studying the gender discriminations in English and Chinese proverbs can reflect the given society’s ideology and customs.With the help the theories and researches in this field, the author makes a systematic analysis of gender discrimination in proverbs from sevsen distinct angles, trying to identify the root causes of sexism so as to enhance people’s understanding of sexism in language, strengthen the awareness of people’s prevention of using discriminational words or expressions, make language and our society develop harmoniously, and eventually provide a more valuable basis for futher research in this field.